Color Gate — a free colour timing game you play with one thumb

You are a small ball in a vertical shaft, and you only go up because you keep tapping. Above you hang rings built from coloured arcs, turning slowly. A ring is solid all the way round, so there is no gap to aim for — the only thing that gets you through is the arc you touch being the same colour as you are. Match it and the ring unlocks with a chime and stops being dangerous. Touch any other arc and the run ends there.

Under every ring floats an orb that changes your colour, so you never carry the same key twice in a row. That turns each gate into the same small question asked with different numbers: the arc you now need is somewhere on a wheel that is turning at a known speed, and you have to arrive at the bottom of that wheel exactly when it does. Meanwhile the dark at the bottom of the shaft keeps climbing, so hesitating has a price. It is free, needs no download, and plays the same on a phone, a tablet or a keyboard.

How to play

• Tap anywhere to give the ball an upward push. On a keyboard use Space, ↑ or W.
• Fly through the orb below each ring — it changes you to the colour drawn on it, and that is the arc you now have to hit.
• Touch the ring where your colour is, at the very bottom of the circle. The arc that will meet you is marked by the notch under the ring.
• Any other colour ends the run, and so does dropping into the dark at the bottom of the shaft.
• Hit an arc dead centre for a PERFECT: it pays a burst of extra lift, and the pitch climbs with the streak.
• Your score is the number of gates you opened. Restarting is one tap, and your best five runs stay on your own device.

Why this is a pacing puzzle and not a reaction test

Every ring is a clock. A four-arc ring shows your colour at the bottom for exactly a quarter of its turn, so the question is never can you react — you can see the arc coming for seconds — it is whether you can arrange to be in the right place when it arrives. That is a different skill, and it is the one the flying does the work for: a tap gives a fixed push and gravity takes it back, so your rate of climb is something you set by how often you tap. Tap hard and you get there early and have to hang about; tap lazily and the arc has already gone by.

Good players therefore stop thinking about the ring and start thinking about the gap between them. The moment the orb hands you a colour, look at where that arc is on the wheel and work out how long it needs to come round; then climb at whatever rate turns that into an arrival. Hovering directly under a ring is the beginner's move, and it is expensive, because the dark at the bottom of the shaft rises whether you are making progress or not — and it rises faster the further you have got.

The difficulty is a single number: how long your colour sits at the bottom of the ring. It starts a little over two seconds and shrinks towards a third of a second, quickly at first and then more and more slowly, so the game keeps tightening without ever asking for a tap no hand could place. Everything else follows from it — the rings spin faster because the window got smaller, not the other way round. The eight-arc rings turn at half the speed for the same window, which is why they feel calmer and are not: your colour comes round twice as often, but the keyhole is half as wide.

One practical note on the colours themselves. They are picked to differ in brightness as well as hue, and each one also carries its own shape — a dot, a triangle, a square, a diamond — repeated on the arc, on the orb and inside the ball. If you have trouble telling any two of them apart, play the shapes instead of the colours; the game is the same game.

More games

For more one-button timing try Flappy Dot, Stick Bridge or Pin Spin, and for colour under pressure try the Stroop Test. Or browse all games.