Ryzl Game

Rules

This game shows you cards of different colors. One of them has the color that the game selects – randomly – as the solution color. It is this very color that you must identify using your intuition.

The game starts with a choice of two cards. As you move along and succeed, the number of cards will increase. It will upgrade from two to three cards, then four, and so on, hence making the challenge harder and more interesting. You must succeed three times in a row with a certain number of cards to reach a higher card number. But watch out ! If you make wrong decisions you’ll step down to a lesser choice of cards.

You can play in two modes : the normal mode and the inverse mode. In the normal mode the cards are placed facing up ; you can see the colors. In the inverse mode, you’re being shown the solution color and you must identify which of the cards, turned over, also bears this color.

The little twist of the game

The cards may be of 10 different colors : white, yellow, orange, red, green, clear blue, dark blue, purple, grey, black. When you’re at the level where you’re asked to choose between two possibilities, there are 45 options of color pairs.

One might think all 45 color pairs are interchangeable. Yet scientific research has shown several interesting facts which contradict this preconceived idea. For instance, one succeeds better – on average – at intuitively perceiving the correct color when using the white-green pair. And the color association which gives our intuition a hard time the most, is the red-blue pair.

Furthermore, we’ve added to the 10 classic colors an eleventh one : gold. Whenever the golden card is the solution and you’ve found it, you immediately climb to the next upper level.

Note that the highest scores ever obtained to this day are those of the Tchek Pavel Stepanek. In a series involving 25000 pairs, using cards of 8 colors, Stepanek obtained 16166 hits and 8834 miss. This yields a hit rate of 64.6%, versus 50% for chance alone. And this exceedingly intuitive young man did even better : using the green-white pair, on 1000 trials, his hit rate climbed to 84.5% of success – an ultimate record !

Now, it’s your turn to play ! Will you do better than Pavel, and will you select the golden card whenever you should ?

Why Ryzl ?

This game is based on an actual experiment conceived in the early 1960’s by Milan Ryzl (1928-2011), a researcher born in Tchecoslovakia. Biochemist by training, Ryzl was also a leader in scientific research on intuition. He explored original paths, and made important discoveries to understand the phenomenon and its practical use. Harassed by his country’s political regime (nosy about this type of research and forcing Ryzl to act as a spy), he moved to the United States in 1967.

Ryzl was particularly keen on exploring the limits of intuitive perception, and the states of consciousness that might favor its manifestation (primarily hypnosis). He believed – rightly so – that our intuitive perceptions improve with practice, especially when we place ourselves in the appropriate state of consciousness by autosuggestion.