Scan and find · reading
Eye See You
Read the description. Find the one person it fits.
The game runs right here in the page — portrait or landscape, whichever way you are holding the phone. Nothing to download, and no account needed.
- Players
- One player — or a whole class around a projector
- Plays on
- Desktop, laptop, Chromebook, tablet and phone · mouse or touch · built for an upright screen
- Quick controls
- Tap or click a person · scroll to search · pinch or + and − to zoom
About Eye See You
Somewhere in a crowd at the seaside is one person wearing exactly what the clue says — a red cap and a striped blue shirt, holding a yellow balloon — and you have a minute or so to find them. That is the whole game. It sounds easy for about three levels.
What makes it hard is that the crowd is built to be read carefully. From level two, every board plants look-alikes: people who match every detail of the clue except one. Somewhere in the same crowd as the person with the balloon is someone in the same red cap and the same striped blue shirt, with nothing in their hands. Skim the sentence and you will click the wrong one. The game is a reading game wearing a searching game's clothes.
For the first four levels the clue comes with a small portrait of the person, so you can match the picture to the words. From level five the portrait is gone and the words are all you have. By level ten there are close to three hundred people in the crowd and five of them to find. Every board is generated fresh — the crowd, the clues and the look-alikes change every time — so a level can be replayed without the answer being remembered.
Everyone in the crowd is a little different, and that is the only reason anyone can be found at all. The clues only ever describe what people wear and what they carry — never a face, skin or hair. After every level the game turns each clue back into a full sentence to read out loud, which is why it has a second life as a describing lesson for children learning English.
For teachers
Use it in class — a describing lesson
Every clue in Eye See You is the same sentence pattern — wearing a ___, holding a ___ — with the words changing each time. That makes it a ready-made describing lesson for children learning English: colors, clothing, patterns, adjective order (a striped blue shirt, not a blue striped shirt), a or an, and the difference between wearing and holding.
It also teaches the right habit for describing people. The game describes what people wear and carry, and never how their bodies look. That is a good rule to keep in the room when learners start describing each other.
- 01
Before playing
Teach the handful of words the clues are built from: five hats, three shirt patterns, seven things people hold, two kinds of glasses and ten colors.
- 02
Play it together
Project levels one to four, which show a portrait beside the clue. One learner reads the clue aloud, the class calls out where to look, and after a wrong pick you ask which word was different.
- 03
Flip it around
In pairs, one learner silently picks a person in the crowd and describes them; the other finds them. Learners discover quickly that one more word is what separates a person from a look-alike.
- 04
What makes you findable?
Each learner writes one sentence a friend could use to find them in a crowd, about their own clothes or something they carry. Read a few aloud and let the class guess who.
Eye See You — ESL & Classroom Companion
The full lesson as a free printable: picture vocabulary drawn from the game, a play-together routine, the grammar focus, frames for three proficiency levels and a photocopiable student page. 6 pages, PDF. No email, no signup — print it and share it with colleagues.
Screenshots
What Eye See You looks like
The briefing and the hunt. The clue stays pinned at the top while you scroll the crowd.
Zoomed in on the crowd. The person in the green ring has been found and crossed off.
After each level, every clue comes back as a full sentence to read out loud.
Guide
How to play Eye See You
- 01
1. Read the clue before you start the clock
Each level opens on a briefing: the clue, how many people are in the crowd, how long you have and how many look-alikes are planted. The clock does not run on this screen, so take the time to read every word. Colors, patterns and the thing in their hands all count.
- 02
2. Scroll down through the crowd
The crowd is a tall column that runs well below the bottom of the screen from level two onward. Scroll down to search it all — on a computer you can also click and drag to move around. The clue stays pinned at the top of the screen while you look.
- 03
3. Click or tap the person who matches
Pick the right person and they are ringed in green and crossed off the list. Pick the wrong person and three seconds come off the clock. Tapping empty ground costs nothing, so a slip of the finger between people is not punished.
- 04
4. Zoom in, or survey the whole scene
Use + and − to zoom, or pinch on a touchscreen. Survey pulls back to show the entire crowd at once, which is the fastest way to rule out whole areas — scan for the right hat color first, then zoom in to check the rest of the clue.
- 05
5. Use a hint only when you are stuck
Hint lights up the block of the scene the next person is standing in and takes six seconds off the clock. It narrows the search to a ninth of the crowd; it does not point at anyone.
- 06
6. Say it out loud
Clear a level and each clue comes back as a full sentence — 'I found the person wearing…' — to read aloud. Then carry on to the next level, replay this one for a better score, or pick any level you have unlocked.
Full controls
| Action | Keyboard | Touch |
|---|---|---|
| Pick a person | Click them | Tap them |
| Search the crowd | Scroll, or click and drag | Swipe up and down |
| Zoom in / out | + and − buttons, or the + and − keys, or Ctrl + scroll | Pinch, or the + and − buttons |
| See the whole crowd | Survey button, or the 0 key | Tap Survey |
| Hint (−6 seconds) | Hint button, or H | Tap Hint |
| Restart the level | The ↻ button | Tap ↻ |
| Level select | Escape | Level select on the briefing or results screen |
Scoring and progression
Points for speed and accuracy
A cleared level scores 250 for each person found, plus 12 for every second left on the clock, minus 40 for each wrong pick and 60 for each hint. The lowest a cleared level can score is 60. Running out of time scores nothing and the crowd reshuffles for the next try.
Ten levels, then an endless run
Clearing a level unlocks the next. The ten levels move through six scenes, from a beach of 26 people to a palm-lined promenade of 285. Clear all ten and an endless run opens, where the crowd keeps growing and the clock keeps shrinking.
Saved on your own device
Unlocked levels and your best score on each are kept in the browser on the device you play on. There is no account and nothing is uploaded — which also means a shared classroom computer remembers how far the class got.
Tips for getting further
- Read the last part of the clue first. The thing in someone's hands is the detail look-alikes most often get wrong.
- Search by the rarest detail. A top hat or an umbrella narrows the crowd faster than a shirt color does.
- Press Survey at the start of a big level and scan for the hat color before you zoom in on anyone.
- 'No hat' and 'nothing in their hands' are clues too — the person you want is the one without.
- A wrong pick costs three seconds and a hint costs six. Two careful looks are cheaper than one guess.
- Striped and spotted are easy to confuse at a distance. Zoom in before you commit.
For families — a book about why we are all different
Picture book · Ages 4–8 · read aloudCOLORSEye See You is about noticing what makes one person different from everyone around them. COLORS asks the bigger question behind that: why difference exists at all. A box of crayons draws the whole world, and every page makes the same point: take any one crayon out of the box and something in the picture goes missing. It is a faith-framed book, written for families, homeschool and Sunday school rather than the public-school classroom.See the book