Pymetrics Tower Game: What It Measures & How to Practice

TL;DR: The tower game shows you a starting arrangement of stacked pieces and a target, and asks you to get from one to the other in as few moves as possible, usually under a clock. It measures planning — specifically whether you work the sequence out before you start moving. Unlike the risk and trait games in the same battery, this one is genuinely trainable, and the training is mostly a habit rather than a capacity.

What the task involves

You are shown pegs or columns holding coloured pieces, plus a target picture of how they should end up. You move one piece at a time, and there is a move limit or a target number you are being measured against.

It is a version of a classic planning paradigm psychologists call the Tower of London (a cousin of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle). The rules are trivial to understand — the difficulty is entirely in sequencing.

Pymetrics does not publish the mechanics and the battery varies by employer, so your invitation and its tutorial screens are the source of truth, including over this page.

What it actually measures

Three things load together, and separating them tells you what to practise:

Forward planning. Can you see the whole sequence before committing to move one? The task is built so that the obvious first move is frequently wrong — you often have to move a piece away from where it needs to end up in order to free something underneath.

Impulse control. The scoring notices people who start moving immediately and correct as they go. That approach almost always uses more moves than the minimum, which is exactly what is being counted.

Working memory. Holding the planned sequence in mind while executing it, without losing your place halfway.

Employers read the combination as a proxy for thinking a piece of work through before starting it, rather than diving in and reworking.

The one habit that decides your score

Plan the full sequence before you touch anything.

That sounds obvious and almost nobody does it under time pressure. The instinct is to start moving because moving feels like progress. On this task it is the opposite: every unplanned move you have to undo counts against you twice.

Concretely, before your first move:

• Look at the target, not the start.
• Identify which piece must end up at the bottom of each stack — those have to be placed first, so everything above them must be moved out of the way.
• Work out where the temporarily displaced pieces will park.
• Only then begin, and execute the plan without improvising.

A useful discipline: if you find yourself moving a piece you have already moved once, stop and re-plan. You have left the plan and are now solving by trial and error, which is what the minimum-move count punishes.

Where to practise it

Pathfinder puzzle is the closest match we have. It trains exactly the habit above — map the whole route before you move, then execute — and it punishes improvising in the same way. This is the one to drill.

Supporting the planning are the memory capacities that let you hold a sequence while carrying it out:

• Corsi block visual memory — spatial sequences and positions.
• Digit span — holding an ordered series without it decaying.
• N-back — keeping a mental state updated while new information arrives, which is what executing a plan under a clock feels like.

Each run is scored server-side against fixed norms and returns a percentile, so you can see whether the habit is actually taking hold rather than guessing.

Where the tower sits in the pymetrics battery

The tower is one of roughly a dozen short games. The crucial thing to know is that they are not all the same kind of task, and treating them alike wastes your preparation:

• Cognitive games — memory span, attention, processing speed, numerical judgement, and this planning task. Trainable, and worth your time.
• Trait and risk games — the balloon task, money-exchange and effort tasks. These read who you are, have no high score, and trying to perform a profile tends to produce inconsistency that reads worse than an honest run.

The complete pymetrics games guide covers all of them, and Harver vs pymetrics explains why your invitation might name either company.

FAQ

What is the pymetrics tower game? A planning task: rearrange stacked pieces from a starting position into a target arrangement using as few moves as possible, usually against a clock. It is a version of the Tower of London paradigm.

What does it measure? Forward planning, impulse control and working memory — chiefly whether you work out the whole sequence before you start moving.

Can you practise for it? Yes, and more than most of the battery. Much of the gain is a habit rather than a capacity: plan fully, then execute. That transfers directly from puzzle practice.

Is there a minimum number of moves I should hit? The optimum varies per arrangement and pymetrics does not publish targets. Aim to plan completely rather than to hit a number — the move count follows from the planning.

Does speed matter more than move count? Move count is the headline, but the clock is real. A fast solution that took twice the minimum moves scores worse than a slightly slower optimal one.

Should I restart if I make a mistake? Assume you cannot, and do not count on it. The better protection is the pre-move plan.

Is the tower game the same as the balloon game? No, and they could not be more different. The balloon reads risk appetite and has no correct answer; the tower has a measurable optimum and rewards preparation.

GamePrep is an independent practice platform and is not affiliated with pymetrics or Harver. Game sets vary by employer and change between cycles — treat your invitation and its official practice materials as the source of truth. We provide related practice only — no leaked questions or answers.