Tap Order

Numbers are scattered across a five-by-five grid and you tap them in order, starting at one. Three of them in the first round, four in the next, and one more every round after that until there are eight. It sounds like the same job each time. It is not, and the round summary shows you exactly how much it is not: your seconds per target, on the smallest set you cleared and on the largest, side by side.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is focused.
2. Move the reticle with the arrow keys. The ring shows which square you are on. Pressing a horizontal and a vertical arrow together moves one square diagonally.
3. Press Enter or Space to tap the square you are on. A tap on the number you are looking for crosses it off with a tick; the banner above the board then names the next one.
4. Work upwards from 1. Tapping a number out of turn costs half a second of the fuse — no lives, just time. Tapping an empty square, or one you already crossed off, costs nothing at all.
5. Clear the whole set before the bar empties. The bar under the banner is the round's fuse. Run it out and you lose one of three lives and move on to the next, larger round anyway.
6. On a touchscreen, tap a square to step the reticle towards it. The step that lands on the square also taps it, so the arrival and the tap are one gesture.
7. Read the summary. It gives your time per target on the smallest set you cleared and on the largest, and the difference between them.

Why does finding the next number take longer when there are more of them on screen?

Because you are not seeing the board, you are searching it. For a target that does not pop out on its own — and a digit among other digits never does — the visual system has no way to check every square at once. It moves attention from place to place, checking one candidate at a time, so the time to find something rises with the number of places it might be. Psychologists call that a serial search, and its signature is a straight-ish line: plot time against set size and you get a slope, not a flat line. The slope is roughly constant per item, which means each extra number on the board adds to the cost of finding not just itself but every number after it — which is why a round of eight feels more than twice as long as a round of four rather than exactly twice. Two other things push in the same direction here: the numbers you have already crossed off stay on the board as clutter to be rejected, and you cannot remember where anything is from one round to the next because the layout is redrawn every time. Tap Order measures the slope on you rather than describing it: identical rules, one more target per round, and your own seconds per target at each end of the range.

Is my time per target really going to go up every session?

Not always, and the summary will tell you honestly when it did not. The effect is real and large in aggregate, but a single session is six rounds long, and six points is a small sample against the noise of one badly placed number, one fumbled key or one lucky glance. If a session comes out flat, play a few more — the reliable version of this measurement in a laboratory takes dozens of trials at each set size, not one.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. There is no currency, nothing to buy, no lives to refill for a fee, and nothing to win or lose but the round in front of you. Six rounds and three lives is the whole economy.

How is the time limit for each round decided?

From the board itself, not from a stopwatch someone picked. Before a round starts, the game runs a reference search over that exact layout: for each number in turn it sweeps the grid from the top-left until the number appears, counting the squares it inspects, and then counts the steps the reticle has to walk to reach it. The fuse is that measured work, priced in ticks, plus a floor to register that a new board appeared, plus a slack margin. Only the slack shrinks as you clear rounds — the work the layout actually demands is never taken away from you. So a round can never be dealt that the reference search could not finish in the time given, and the difficulty comes from the margin closing rather than from the game becoming impossible.

Can a round ever be missing a number, or have two in the same square?

No, and that is guaranteed by how a board is built rather than checked after the fact. The generator draws the squares first — a partial shuffle of the cell list, which by construction cannot hand back the same square twice — and only then writes 1, 2, 3 and so on into them in order. Every number from one to the round's size exists exactly once, no two share a square, and therefore a complete ascending route always exists. There is nothing to reject and no fallback board, because no board can come out wrong.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both. The arrow keys and Enter are the primary controls — there is nothing here a pointer can do that a keyboard cannot. For a screen reader the grid is announced cell by cell, with its number or as empty, and the square under the reticle is announced as selected, so you can locate the number you need and steer to it. That turns the visual scan into an auditory one, which is a different sense but the same task, and the timing still measures searching rather than looking. The fuse is a labelled progress bar, and nothing anywhere in the game is distinguished by colour alone: a crossed-off number carries a tick, a mis-tap carries a cross, an empty square carries a dot, and the reticle is a ring.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — every board is generated locally from a seed, so no server is involved in play at any point, and nothing about your session leaves the device.

Six rounds, three lives, three to eight targets on a five-by-five grid. The numbers are redrawn every round on purpose, so nothing carries over and there is nothing to memorise — which also means this is a test of searching, not of learning a layout. A wrong tap costs half a second and never a life, because losing your place is the mistake the game is about and charging twice for one slip makes a timed game feel broken rather than hard. On a touchscreen the reticle steps one square per tap, so a phone is genuinely slower than a keyboard here and the two are not comparable. And the summary is something interesting about your afternoon, not a result about you: six rounds is a small sample, and tiredness, screen size and viewing distance all move the number more than most people expect.

Quick Count asks the neighbouring question about the same few hundred milliseconds: not how long it takes to find one thing among many, but how many things you can take in without counting at all. Side Step is the other game here that measures something about you and then hands you the measurement instead of keeping it.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.