Reading game
Letter search — find the letters, train your focus
Two target letters, a hundred to search through. Letter search is a pure visual scanning exercise — the same skill your eyes use every time you proofread a sentence or look a name up in a list.
Free to play, no sign-up. Want to track your progress across six skills? The Axolumi app is coming to Google Play.
How to play Letter Search
- A 10×10 grid of random letters appears, with your 2 target letters shown above it.
- Find and tap 4 instances of each target — 8 finds clear the grid.
- A fresh grid loads with the same targets, so your eyes keep hunting familiar shapes.
- A wrong tap costs 2 seconds, so glance twice before you press.
- Stall for 10 seconds and one target letter glows to get you moving. Clear as many grids as you can in 60 seconds.
What Letter Search trains
- Focus · 50%
- Speed · 30%
- Reading · 20%
Letter search is a classic cancellation task — the kind psychologists have long used to exercise and measure visual attention. Picking two specific letters out of a hundred distractors trains selective attention: your brain learns to hold a target in mind, ignore everything that is not it, and move on without getting pulled off course. Because the grid refills the moment you clear it, there is no natural pause — you practise re-engaging over and over.
The harder levels add a reading-adjacent challenge. When grids switch to uppercase or mix cases freely, an e and an E are the same find but different shapes, so you have to recognize the letter itself rather than one fixed image of it. That flexible, fast letter recognition is one of the quiet building blocks of fluent reading — and the 60-second clock layers processing speed on top.
Tips to improve
- Scan in a steady pattern — row by row or column by column — instead of darting around. Systematic beats frantic.
- Hold both targets in mind at once; catching either one on a single pass is twice as fast as two separate sweeps.
- On mixed-case grids, look for the letter, not the case — an R and an r both count.
- Accuracy first. One wrong tap costs more time than a careful half-second look ever will.
Frequently asked questions
A letter search game shows you a grid of random letters and asks you to find every instance of one or more target letters. It belongs to the family of cancellation tasks, which have been used for over a century to train and assess visual attention. In this version you hunt 2 targets, 4 instances each, through continuous 10×10 grids for 60 seconds.
Mainly selective attention and visual scanning — the ability to lock onto a target and search a busy field without losing it. The time pressure adds processing speed, and recognizing letters quickly across different cases supports the low-level recognition skills that fluent reading is built on.
Because it makes your brain work at the level of letters, not shapes. On easy levels you can match one fixed image; once grids mix uppercase and lowercase, you have to recognize that G and g are the same target in two costumes. That flexible recognition is a genuinely harder — and more useful — skill.
It trains one of reading's building blocks: fast, automatic letter recognition. It will not replace reading practice, but sharper letter recognition and a wider, calmer visual search both carry over to how comfortably your eyes move through text.
Little and often works best. One or two 60-second rounds a day is enough to notice smoother scanning and fewer wasted glances within a couple of weeks — your accuracy usually improves before your speed does.
