Whack a Mole — the free browser version of the fairground classic

Nine holes, one clock, thirty seconds. Moles pop up and drop back down whether you hit them or not, and the longer the run goes the less time you get: by the final ten seconds a mole is above ground for under half a second and two or three are up at once. Hit as many as you can. The one thing you must not touch is the bomb, which starts appearing partway through the run and takes three seconds off your clock every time you swat it by mistake.

It's the arcade cabinet everyone has played at a bowling alley or a seaside pier, rebuilt as a web page: no download, no account, no plastic hammer. Works with a mouse on a desktop and with one thumb on a phone, and your best five runs are kept on your own device so you always have a number to beat.

How to play

• Tap or click a mole while it is above ground. Each one is worth a point.
• The golden mole is rarer and worth three — take it first if two are up together.
• Never hit a bomb. It costs three seconds of your remaining time and resets your streak.
• Consecutive hits build a streak; the beep climbs in pitch as it grows.
• Empty holes are free to hit — there is no accuracy penalty, only the time you waste.

Why you keep missing, and the two things that actually fix it

Whack-a-mole is a near-perfect demonstration of Fitts's law: the time it takes to hit a target grows with the distance you have to travel and shrinks as the target gets bigger. The moles are all the same size, so the only variable you control is distance — which is why the single biggest improvement available to you costs no reflexes at all. Return your hand to the centre of the grid after every hit instead of leaving it where the last mole was. From the middle hole, the furthest corner is one short move; from a corner, the opposite corner is the longest move on the board and you will lose the mole every time.

The second fix is where you look. Beginners track — they stare at the mole they are hitting, so they discover the next one only after it has already been up for a moment. Better players fix their gaze at the centre and let peripheral vision report the pop. Peripheral vision is poor at detail but excellent at motion, which is exactly the signal here, and it takes in all nine holes at once instead of one. The cost of an eye movement is about 200 milliseconds of blindness — a saccade suppresses vision while it is in flight — and late in the run a mole is only up for 500.

The bomb exists to stop those two habits from becoming pure autopilot. Once you are hitting on reflex alone, the run stops being a speed test and becomes an inhibition test: can you cancel a movement that is already on its way? That's the same thing a psychologist measures with a stop-signal task, and it is genuinely hard — expect to eat a bomb or two in every fast run, and don't let it tilt you into a second one.

More games

More tests of hand speed: the Aim Trainer, the Reflex Test, or the CPS Test. Or browse all games.