BrainDrain - sharpen your wits app for iPhone and iPad

BrainDrain is a game designed to sharpen your wits, improve your concentration and improve your reading skills.

It is a simple idea - there is a grid of items, ranging from 2x2 to 7x7 - these can be letters, numbers, words and you have to remove them in order, by touching on them. The quicker you do it, the higher your score. The score is a combination of the time remaining (there is a timer bar at the bottom of the game screen) and a difficulty level - you get more points for doing the sequence backwards, for example.

To help you improve your skills, by making the test more challenging, there are several options you can turn off and on as you like. You can do the test backwards - z to a rather than a to z. The tiles can move about - either you can ‘slide’ a row, or rotate the outer row (or both), fast and slow. You can increase distraction by having the background colours of the tiles change, and finally you can have the text or numbers upside down, back to front or if you really want, both.

There are several preset ‘sets’ - numbers and letters, both ‘sequential’ (e.g. 1,2,3,4,5) or ‘spaced’ - with gaps in - (e.g. 1,3,6,8,10). There is a set of three letter words to be sorted alphabetically, and the top 500 english words, again sorted alphabetically.

You can also create you own word set for a challenge - there is an editor accessed using the box/arrow icon (bottom left on the setup screen) which takes you to a simple but functional editor which allows you to enter word lists. You can do this either by typing directly or by cut and pasting text in from other programs or web pages. This can be any text you like, but the ‘required’ order in this case is not the alphabetical order but the order the text is typed in. The ‘default’ text here is a poem “Kubla Khan” by Coleridge, and you have to do the words not alphabetically, but in the order they are in the poem (only the first 49 words are used). As a result, this is probably the first app ever to have a class member called “xanadu” …..

Again, this is not alphabetical order, so you would click ‘in’ ‘xanadu’ ‘did’ ‘kubla’ ‘khan’ and so on (best done in 7x7 grid)

Both the high score table and the users word list are saved between games, in your tablet or phone’s document store.

The app is free and complete, there are no in app purchases, but there are unobtrusive advertisements at the top of some screens.