Master Simon

Everyone knows the slightly annoying Simon game. I made a very simple one around 20 years ago (here). I’ve now made a new one that adds several "annoyances" to the game. The outcome is that the game is almost unplayable for a human without going crazy. Just as I wanted it to be. This tests not only your memory but also your resilience to distractions and your concentration. 

Built on a custom PCB around an STM32G081 it also features an LCD display (DOGS164), a piezo driver (PAM8904) and SK6812 RGBW LEDs. The STM32G081 is well-suited as it includes a good RNG. The display shows the rounds and settings menu.

The key principle of the game is remembering a sequence. Each round the sequence gets extended by one. Now one could say that the sequence is a sequence of numbers. Each number corresponds to a button. A button has configuration of a position, a color and a tone. The clue is now that this Simon introduces faulty buttons to the sequence in various modes or various places. The user must, in addition to remembering the sequence, identify the incorrect ones and act accordingly. While making the video I noticed a tiny bug: when pressing an additional button it did not show an error. That's fixed.

The annoyances and game features are:

• 3, 4 or 5 button mode.
• Time limit for pressing the correct button, just to add some extra stress.
• Randomizer sequence types: full random or permuted.
• Injection modes: adds random buttons into the displayed sequence. The key here is to remember the correct button configuration. The injected ones will have incorrect button configurations. 
• Chaos: shows an additional incorrect button. 
• Random location: a button can be shown at an incorrect location but with correct tone and color. 
• Randomized showing time: the amount of time each button is shown varies. 

Note that each feature can be individually enabled or disabled and there are lots of settings to apply to each of them. 

Here is a short video. This is not the full extent of what is possible. 

The 3D-printed case gives it a nice and compact form factor.