Before you enrol.

Playcebo is a revision platform for medical students and doctors preparing for postgraduate exams. Underneath, it is a question bank: thousands of exam-standard questions across specialties, with explanations, built around active recall. What makes it Playcebo is how you take the questions — the delivery mechanism is blinded until launch.

Playcebo covers medical school exams — including finals — and postgraduate medical exams. The question bank spans specialties and topics, from anatomy and physiology to pharmacology, written to the standard of the exams themselves. Specific exam mappings will be disclosed nearer launch.

The compound is familiar: exam-standard questions with explanations. The delivery mechanism is not, and it is the part we are keeping blinded until launch. What we can disclose is that it involves absolutely no grim scrolling, and that it is designed so you come back voluntarily — because active recall only works if you actually do it.

The closed beta ran through 2026 and is now complete. The full release launches on 1 December. Join the launch list and you’ll be notified the moment the doors open.

Playing is free at launch: every player gets a daily allowance of doses. Pricing details will be announced at launch — joining the list costs an email address and nothing else.

Join the launch list: leave your email address, tell us where you are in training, and we’ll email you when Playcebo launches on 1 December. That is the whole procedure.

The method is. Active recall — answering questions from memory rather than re-reading notes — is one of the most robustly supported techniques in the learning literature, where it is known as the testing effect or retrieval practice. Spacing that practice out over time strengthens the effect further. Playcebo is built so that retrieval practice is the thing you do by default, not the thing you force yourself to do.

Yes. Playcebo runs in the browser on any reasonably modern phone, tablet or computer — nothing to install for the beta. If you can read this page on it, it can take the trial.

The questions are written and reviewed by the investigators — people who sat these exams — to medical school and postgraduate exam standards, and every question is checked before it enters the live bank. Each comes with an explanation, because knowing why an answer is right is what makes the fact stay.

It is our tagline, and a small joke about our name. A placebo contains no active ingredient, yet people still report feeling better. Playcebo contains no pharmacologically active ingredient either — the entire effect comes from active recall, which, unlike placebo, has rather good evidence behind it.