05

Pymetrics cards game practice

Game 5 of 12 · about 3 min

Four decks, $2,000 and sixty cards. Every card pays you and some also charge you. Two of the decks lose money over the run, and nobody tells you which.

Risk appetite Learning from feedback Reaction to loss

Unofficial practice. Not the real Pymetrics game and not connected to Pymetrics, Harver or any employer. Untimed, unlimited retries, nothing saved and nothing sent anywhere.

How the Pymetrics cards game works

  1. Turn one card at a time, from whichever of the four decks you like.
  2. Every card pays you something. Some cards also charge you, and you see both amounts.
  3. You start with $2,000 and you get sixty cards in total.
  4. The decks are not equal. Two gain money over a long run and two lose it, at the same rate as each other.
  5. Nothing is explained and nothing is signposted. The only way to find out is to turn cards and watch.
  6. There is no clock. Take as long over each card as you want.
  7. Tap a deck, or use keys 1 to 4. Untimed, retry as often as you like.

What the cards game measures

Three separate things, and the final balance is the least interesting of them. It watches how much of the run you spend on the two decks that pay the most per card, which are the two that lose. It compares your first ten cards against your last ten, so improving across the run counts for more than opening on a good deck and never moving. And it watches which kind of punishment you avoid: the deck that charges you once in ten costs exactly as much as the deck that charges you five times in ten, so steering by how often it hurts rather than how much is visible in the numbers.

Or play all 12 in one sitting

This page is the cards game on its own, practice only. The full run is the rehearsal. All 12 back to back in the order the real assessment most commonly uses them, timed, one attempt each, and no feedback until the end. About 35 minutes, and nothing is saved, so it needs one sitting.

Take the full timed run

All 12 Pymetrics games

Next: money exchange 1 game
01Balloon 02Digits 03Arrows 04Keypress 05Cards 06Money Exchange 1 07Money Exchange 2 08Easy or Hard 09Lengths 10Faces 11Stop 12Towers All 12 games

About the Pymetrics cards game

Answered straight, including the parts people would rather hear differently.

Two of the four gain money over a long run and two lose it. But the two that lose are not the same as each other, and neither are the two that gain. Each pair contains one deck that charges you small amounts constantly and one that stays quiet then takes a large amount in a single hit. Which of those two you find harder to sit through is part of what the game is reading.
No. The four are reshuffled across the four positions at the start of every run. On a practice site that is essential, because otherwise your second attempt would be measuring what you remembered rather than what you worked out. After a run finishes we tell you which decks were which.
It is a tempting rule and it costs you money. Two of the decks charge you on half their cards and still come out ahead over the run, so a player who moves after every hit never stays anywhere long enough to find them. How readily you move on after being charged is recorded separately from your balance, because it says something different about you.
Not over sixty cards. The worst run possible still finishes above zero, because every card that charges you also pays you first. The game is about the shape of your choices, not about surviving.
The real assessment is a version of the Iowa Gambling Task, a decision-making test published in 1994 and replicated for thirty years since. Its payoff table is public, so the amounts here are the real ones rather than something invented to feel right. The one thing nobody publishes is how many cards the employer version deals, and sixty is our reading of a game every source describes as taking two to three minutes.

Pymetrics and Harver are trademarks of their respective owners and are not affiliated with OpenThinkr. Practice results are for interest and self-reflection, not assessment.