Pulse Grid

One tile lights up at a time. Hit it before it fades. Every hit makes the next window shorter — three misses and the run is over.

▶ Tap to play no download · no account · works on mobile

How to play

A 4×4 grid sits in the middle of the screen. One cell lights up green and a ring starts draining around the centre of that cell. Click or tap the cell before the ring empties. Hit it and the next cell lights up somewhere else, with slightly less time on the clock.

Wrong cell? You don't lose a life, but your streak resets — and the streak is where the points are. Let the ring run out and you lose one of three lives. At zero, the run ends and you get a score, a longest-streak count, and an honest verdict on whether it beat your best.

Scoring

Base hit: 10 points
Streak bonus: +2 per consecutive hit, capped at +20
No time bonus: hitting fast doesn't pay extra — accuracy and not breaking the chain do
Daily challenge: 45 seconds instead of three lives; every miss costs 2.5 seconds

Why it's built this way

The interesting decision here is that the game never speeds up the tiles — it shortens the window. A tile that stays lit for 1.15 seconds at the start is down to roughly 0.45 seconds by the twentieth hit, and then it stops shrinking. That floor is deliberate: below about 400 ms you're not playing a reaction game any more, you're playing a guessing game, and the difference between a good run and a bad one stops being about attention.

The streak bonus exists for the same reason. Pure speed rewards twitch; a streak rewards not blinking. It also means one careless click costs more than one slow click, which is the right incentive for a game that's really about sustained focus.

Two or three things that help

Look at the whole grid, not the lit tile. Your peripheral vision finds the next flash before your eyes finish travelling there.
Aim for the centre of the cell. On a phone, tapping the edge is where misreads happen.
Stop at a high streak, not at a low score. If you're at ×12 and your hands are shaking, that's the run to walk away from.

How this was made

Brief: a reaction game that fits in one HTML file, needs no art, and can be understood in five seconds. Three designs were drafted; two were killed. The first was a Whack-a-Mole variant — rejected because the grid was static and the difficulty curve had nowhere to go. The second had tiles lighting up in pairs — rejected after a playtest where it became obvious that two targets just split attention without adding a decision.

What shipped is the third draft plus eleven rounds of tuning: the life curve, the streak cap, the 430 ms floor, the ring instead of a colour fade (a fade reads as "decoration", a draining ring reads as "hurry"), and the decision to punish wrong taps with a streak reset rather than a life. Total: about four hours of generation, testing, and simulation, zero image assets, every pixel drawn in code.

Rate it — honestly

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