File
Press release
Ref
PSI/PRESS/2026-09
Date
Fri 25 Sep 2026
Contact
hello@playpsi.com
Headline For immediate release

Three superpowers spent decades testing ESP in secret. A solo developer in Sydney just put the test in your pocket, free.

SYDNEY, Fri 25 Sep 2026. PSI: ESP Training is a card game for testing your intuition. Each card is drawn with cryptographic randomness and locked in code before you call it. Every hit and miss goes on your record, and your score is measured against chance.

'I built it for myself, and for kids like my cousins, so they get to test their senses before someone tells them they can't,' said Thomas Nguyen, PSI's developer. 'Most calls miss. That's the odds. But when someone names the exact card twice in one night, everyone gets suspicious, fast. Is the deck rigged? Is she psychic?'

The game is simple. The app draws a card, hides it, and waits for your call. The card flips, and your hit or miss goes on a record scored against chance. That record is the point. One good run is luck. A hundred is something else, and a record kept over months is where the truth shows up: whether you're tapped in or just lucky.

There is a signal you may have felt before. The card you knew before it turned. The friend who texted the moment you thought of them. The bad feeling about a person or place before you knew why. The dream about the thing that then happened. Everybody has a story like that. Almost nobody has a score. PSI is built to make a sixth sense as ordinary as the other five. Inside the app, the training is a program with the codename FIRST LIGHT, the name astronomers give the moment a new instrument first sees, and here the instrument is you. New players are inducted on a phosphor-green terminal and given a codename.

Key features

  • First Sight. Five symbols, one call. Circle, cross, waves, square, star: the deck Karl Zener drew for J. B. Rhine's Duke lab in the 1930s. Chance is 1 in 5. Beat it and the room goes quiet.
  • Night Glass. A real 52-card deck, and you choose how far to go. Red or black is 1 in 2. Suit is 1 in 4. Rank is 1 in 13. Name the whole card and it's 1 in 52. The odds get long. The hits get loud.
  • Signal Index. One number that rates whether you're above chance: your last 100 calls per deck, misses included, passes left out. It can go up. It can go down.
  • Solo Runs. No partner, no shuffling, no setup. Open the app and run 12 or 24 calls, or Survival on 5 lives. The deck resets after every card, so every call is a fresh deal at the same odds.
  • Party Mode. Round Robin: 2 to 8 friends, one phone. A hit keeps the phone and builds your streak. A miss passes it on. By the third hit nobody's laughing. Streaks make people superstitious, fast.
  • ESP League. Climb the monthly board, or set a global record in the Hall of Fame, a public record of what ordinary people can do with this sense.
  • Learn The Method. 21 short modules on the skill behind the call: how to settle, how a signal shows up, how to tell it from a guess. A hundred-year paper trail behind them, from the Duke lab to the declassified files.

Why it exists

Washington spent $20 million over two decades testing whether people can sense a hidden target, then filed the answer as inconclusive. Moscow and Beijing ran programs of their own. Thomas Nguyen has been reading those files since he was 12. What turned them into an app was a card game he played with friends: cards face down, everyone calls the next one, and the streaks made people superstitious fast. Someone would name the exact card, suit and rank, more than once in a night. He got tired of shuffling, and he wanted a deck he could trust, with every card sealed in code before anyone calls, never after.

Price and availability. Free, no account. After 14 days of full access, 3 sessions a day stay free. PSI PRO lifts the limit for US$7.99 a month or US$49.99 a year, about 40 per cent off the first period, then full price. Cancel anytime. Your score, record and stats never go behind the paywall. No ads. PSI is on the App Store, rated 13+, and is entered in RevenueCat's Shipaton 2026.

Download it and run 12 calls to see where you land against chance.

About the developer. Thomas Nguyen is a designer and developer in Sydney, Australia. He has followed the ESP research since he was 12 and trained from Ingo Swann's books. PSI is his first game, built solo, to make ESP ordinary.

Contact. Thomas Nguyen, hello@playpsi.com, playpsi.com, @callitpsi on X, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Press kit: playpsi.com/press

Press kit: playpsi.com/press