If you’ve ever been faced with a CAPTCHA sullenly asking you to type the words in a box below a mishmash of crossed out and jumbled letters, you know how frustrating it can be when you’re inevitably told to try again with another set of just as flurbled letters. A new company says it has an easier way to prove you’re not a robot, just a regular old flustered human.

CAPTCHAs (the acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) verify your humanness for everything from online purchases to registering for email lists. The common experience of wasting time guessing what those distorted letters say (if anything — they’re often gibberish), again and again, led start-up Are You a Human to invent a fun verification method.

Instead of CAPTCHAs, Are You a Human uses mini-games called PlayThrus, reports our super smart siblings over at Consumer Reports. If you are, in fact, a member of homo sapiens, you should be able to figure out how to play the simple game, perhaps placing drinks in a cooler and not a shoe.

A site with PlayThrus will rotate various games with differing components that humans cane asily master, but will leave bots stumped.

Now let’s just see if this thing CAPTCHAs on.

Never mind CAPTCHAs; play games instead [Consumer Reports]

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