Mirror Draw

About this test

Rebuilding a figure as its mirror image needs one precise mental operation: flip the left-right axis and leave the top-bottom axis alone. Described in a sentence it sounds trivial, and it gets hard as soon as the pattern has more than five or six cells, because you can no longer handle each cell separately without losing track.

The change of method lands around level ten. Before that you copy cell by cell, counting columns from the edge — slow but reliable. After that there is no time: you have to hold the overall shape, flip it in one mental move, and lay it down. The players who climb high are the ones who switch to the second method early.

Two traps come up constantly. The first is flipping top and bottom as well, which gives a rotation, not a mirror. The second is counting columns from the centre instead of the edge: on an even grid that shifts everything by one. If you keep failing narrowly, it is almost certainly one of those two.

How it works

The grid is four cells a side. Level one has four lit cells, and each level adds one, up to fifteen of the sixteen cells. You get three lives: a grid submitted with the right number of cells but the wrong layout costs one. Your score is the level reached, mapped to 0-100 between one and fourteen.