Spot the Trap
You are given a goal and a website that would rather you missed it.
Not a quiz about dark patterns — an actual checkout to get through. Buy the two tickets and nothing else. Cancel the membership without being talked out of it. At the end you get a receipt: what you actually paid, what you actually agreed to, and the name of every trick that got past you. The pages below deliberately look nothing like the rest of this site, because the trap is the visual hierarchy — the bright button, the grey link, the box that was already ticked.
Your goal…
Questions people ask
What is a dark pattern?
A design that works against the person using it — a pre-ticked box, a cancel link buried three menus deep, a fee that appears only at checkout. The term was coined by Harry Brignull in 2010. They are design decisions, not accidents.
Are these real companies?
No. Every brand, domain, price and line of copy here is invented. They are composites of patterns documented in the design literature, not screenshots of any real business.
Does everyone get the same flow?
Yes. It is derived from the UTC date, so every player gets the same one without a server telling anyone what it is. It changes at midnight UTC.
Is anything about my game uploaded?
No. Your progress, your streak and the record of which patterns catch you live in this browser's local storage and go nowhere. The uploads counter in the top bar stays at 0.
Why does the countdown reset?
Because that is what real ones do. The timer is there to rush you, expiring costs you nothing, and noticing that is the point of including it.
How this works & why it’s private
The day's flow is generated on your device. A number derived from the UTC date seeds a fixed random generator, which picks the flow, the brand, the prices and the wording. Everyone gets the same one without a server sending it, and because the generator never changes, puzzle #24 will still be puzzle #24 years from now. Your progress and streak sit in this browser's local storage; the result you copy contains a number, a score and a bar, and is built from the outcome alone — it never sees the copy, so it cannot leak it.
Every interface here is invented, and rendered with its own stylesheet on purpose. A dark pattern is mostly a matter of visual weight: which option got the filled button and which got eleven-pixel grey text. Drawn in this site's calm palette they would all look equally reasonable, and there would be nothing to learn.
Several of these are regulated rather than merely rude. Pre-ticked boxes are not valid consent for marketing under the GDPR, and the EU's Digital Services Act prohibits a number of these outright for the platforms it covers. What this game does not do is point at a real company and call it deceptive — that would be a different product, and a far more legally interesting one.