How to play
A target pops up in one of the holes and stays visible for a short window. Hit it before it drops and you score; ignore it and it disappears on its own. The round lasts exactly sixty seconds and there is no way to earn more time, so everything comes down to how many good taps you can fit into a minute.
Three things can appear. The ordinary target is worth ten points and is what you will see most of the time. The golden target is worth twenty-five, shows up roughly one time in ten, and stays visible for only about sixty per cent as long as a normal one — it is a bonus you have to already be looking in the right place to collect. The bomb costs you fifteen points and a miss if you touch it, and it deliberately lingers about a quarter longer than the others, which is what makes a tired player reach for it.
Five numbers describe the round. Score is the total. Hits and Misses count your taps: a miss is either an empty hole you struck or a bomb you set off. Accuracy is hits divided by all taps. Targets that expire untouched are reported at the end as "let through" and are deliberately kept out of the accuracy figure, because being slow and being sloppy are two different problems and mixing them into one percentage hides both.
Controls
- Mouse or touch: click or tap the hole. The whole square is the target area, not just the shape inside it.
- Number keys: 1 to 9 strike the first nine holes, reading left to right and top to bottom. On the three by three board that is every hole on the field.
- Arrow keys: move the focus ring between holes, wrapping at the edges, then Enter or Space to strike. This is the way to reach holes ten to sixteen on the larger board without a mouse.
- Pause: the Pause button freezes the clock and every target window. Switching tabs pauses the round automatically.
Scan the board, do not chase it
The instinct of every new player is to follow each target with their eyes, tap it, then start looking for the next one from wherever their gaze happened to land. That costs you two things: the time spent re-finding the board, and the golden targets that appear and vanish while you are still admiring the last hit.
The habit that actually raises scores is to fix your eyes on the centre of the grid and let peripheral vision do the detection. Your peripheral field is poor at detail but very good at motion, which is precisely the signal a pop-up target produces. Keep looking at the middle, let the change register at the edge of your vision, and move only your hand. On the three by three board this alone is usually worth a few hundred points a round.
The second habit is refusing to tap on suspicion. An empty hole costs you nothing in points but permanently damages your accuracy, and the tap itself costs perhaps a fifth of a second — long enough to lose a real target somewhere else. If you are not sure something is up, do not swing. The bomb makes this discipline non-negotiable, since hitting one throws away more than an ordinary target is worth and it stays visible long enough to feel safe.
The third is choosing well when the four by four board puts two targets up at once. Take the one closer to your hand or cursor unless the far one is golden, in which case take the gold and accept that you may lose the other. A golden target is worth two and a half ordinary ones and it is on screen for a much shorter time, so it is almost always the correct choice when the two compete.
Round targets we reached in our own sessions, so read them as estimates rather than records: on the three by three board, 400 points with accuracy above 90% is a solid session and anything past 700 means your scanning is working. On four by four, expect your first rounds to land near 300 while your eyes learn the extra distance; 600 with fewer than five targets let through is a genuinely good minute. Accuracy under 80% almost always means bombs rather than empty holes — the fix is patience, not speed.
The timing curve, and why the bigger board is not just bigger
The window a target stays visible starts at about 1.15 seconds and shrinks by roughly 22 milliseconds for every hit you land, down to a floor of just under half a second. The gap between spawns shrinks with your hit count as well. This is a deliberate design choice: difficulty tracks your performance in the current round rather than a clock, so a player who is warming up gets a gentle first twenty seconds while a player on a hot streak is pushed straight into the hardest version of the game. A good round therefore feels like it accelerates under you, and it does.
Switching to the four by four board changes three things at once. There are sixteen holes instead of nine, so any single hole is a smaller share of your attention. Two targets can be on screen simultaneously instead of one, which turns the game into a series of small choices. And the physical distance between opposite corners grows, which costs real time on a mouse and real eye movement on a touch screen. Best scores are stored separately for each board because they are not comparable.
Notes on the design
The pop-up target format goes back to the mechanical redemption cabinets that appeared in arcades in the mid-1970s, where a padded mallet and a set of spring-loaded heads did the work that a browser does here. We have kept the shape of that idea and thrown away everything else, since none of it translates: there is no ticket dispenser, no mallet weight and nothing to win. What is left is a pure attention test, which is the part that was always interesting.
Two implementation details are worth knowing because they change how the game feels. First, the board never spawns a target in the hole that was used immediately before, so you cannot camp on one square and farm it. Second, every random choice — which hole, which target type — comes from your browser's cryptographic random source through a rejection loop, so no hole and no type is quietly favoured over the run of a round. The board is built from ordinary HTML buttons rather than a canvas, which is why it works with a keyboard and announces itself to a screen reader.
Questions players ask
Does a target I let expire count against my accuracy?
No. Accuracy only measures your taps: hits divided by hits plus misses. Targets that vanish untouched are reported separately as "let through", so slow and sloppy stay readable as two different problems.
How much is a bomb worth if I hit it?
Minus fifteen points and one miss — worse than skipping an ordinary target, which is only worth ten. The score never falls below zero, and bombs stay visible about a quarter longer than normal targets, which is exactly the trap.
Is the four by four board harder than three by three?
Yes. More holes, two targets at once instead of one, and more distance to cover. Each board size keeps its own best score on your device because the two are not comparable.