Most players hit a wall somewhere between six and nine steps and assume that's their limit. It usually isn't — it's a limit on how they are storing the sequence, and that part is changeable.
Simon Says is a sequence memory game. The board plays a pattern of colours, each with its own tone. You repeat it back exactly. Each round adds one more step to the end, so round seven is the six-step sequence you just played plus one new item.
The original was a physical toy released in 1978, and its design was unusually well judged: pairing each colour with a distinct musical tone means the sequence arrives through two senses at once, which is a large part of why the game is more playable than a purely visual version would be.
There's a well-known finding in psychology, from George Miller's 1956 paper, that short-term memory holds around seven items — plus or minus two. Later work has revised the number downward, with four often cited as more accurate for pure working memory without rehearsal.
Either way, the practical implication is the same: if you're storing the sequence as seven separate unrelated items, you will hit a wall in exactly the range where most players hit one. The way past it isn't more capacity. It's fewer items.
Chunking means grouping individual items into larger units that count as one thing. The phone number 5 5 5 0 1 9 2 is seven items. Grouped as 555–0192 it's two. The information is identical; the load on memory is not.
Applied here: red-blue-green-green-yellow-red-blue is seven items, or it's "red-blue-green" plus "green-yellow" plus "red-blue" — three chunks. Three is comfortably inside anyone's capacity.
The single most effective technique is verbal rehearsal. As each colour lights up, name it — aloud if you're alone, silently if not. Then repeat the growing list to yourself in the gap before your turn.
This works because verbal and visual memory are partly separate systems. Naming the colours creates a second, independently stored copy of the sequence. When your visual recall gets hazy around item five, the verbal track is still running.
Shortening the names helps: "R, B, G, G, Y" is faster to rehearse than the full colour words, and speed matters because you're racing the decay of the trace.
Each button has its own pitch, and those pitches are doing work. If you find yourself watching the lights and ignoring the sound, you're throwing away half the signal. Some players find the sequence easier to recall as a melody than as a list of colours — try closing your eyes for a round and going purely on tone.
This is also why playing on mute makes the game substantially harder than most people expect.
With chunking and rehearsal, sequences in the fifteen-to-twenty range are achievable for most people with practice. Beyond that, players tend to switch to spatial or narrative encoding — building a route or a small story that the colours map onto, borrowing the method-of-loci technique used by competitive memory athletes.
Whether that's still the same game is a fair question. But it does demonstrate the underlying point: the ceiling on this game is an encoding ceiling, not a hardware one.