Beat the Couch

A market timing simulator dressed up as a grudge match against furniture. You are handed $10,000 and two secret years of real S&P 500 history, which then plays forward on a clock in front of you. Your only control is one button: stay in the market, or run to cash. The couch is your opponent, it buys on day one and never touches anything again, and the whole game exists to find out whether you can do better than that.

1. Watch the chart move. You begin fully invested, the month counter climbs from 1 to 24, and you can pause or run it at half, normal, double or quadruple speed.
2. Hit SELL, or tap space, when you think a drop is coming. You go to cash and stop feeling anything, good or bad.
3. Hit BUY back in when you think it is over. Every switch is logged as a trade and the counter is on screen the whole time.

Very few games are built to prove you wrong, and fewer still do it this cleanly. The setup gives you every advantage a real investor does not have, no fees, no taxes, a pause button, and you still have to explain to yourself why the couch is ahead. What makes it stick is the settlement card: it does not just say you lost, it points at the five specific days you were hiding in cash and prices them. It is free, a run takes minutes, and the site is upfront that it is a game rather than advice. The couch, as it notes, is not a licensed advisor either.

Nothing while you play, which is the point. You cannot see what year it is, so a crash gives you no context to reason from. The reckoning is all at the end, and it is specific: your return next to the couch's, the dollar gap between you, the number of trades you made, your time in the market as a percentage, how many of the window's ten best days you spent in cash and what that cost in dollars, and a percentile against random trading it calls the monkey score. The card also gives the window a name once it is over, which turns an abstract chart into a piece of history you should probably have recognised.

Daily hand

The same two secret years for everyone that day, with a day number, a streak counter and a settlement card you can compare with other players.

Random hand

Two years drawn at random from the archive, playable as often as you like.

The other couches

Same one-button game over different histories: Bitcoin on four secret months of six-hour ticks, Gold on two secret years, Apple on a single secret year. Free, but they need a sign-in.

• Decide your speed before you start. At 4x you react on instinct, which is the honest version of the experiment; at 0.5x you can actually deliberate, and the results are usually not much better.
• Count your trades as a cost even though the game charges you nothing for them. The settlement card puts the number front and centre for a reason, and runs with one or two switches tend to land closer to the couch than busy ones.