Number Chase

About this test

Connecting scattered numbers in rising order is the idea behind the Trail Making Test, a pencil-and-paper task used in neuropsychology since the middle of the twentieth century. In its first part you link 1 to 25 with a pen; in the second you alternate numbers and letters, which costs far more attention. The time taken to complete the trail is the measure, and that is exactly what this game borrows.

What is really at stake here is not finger speed but how you organise your gaze. A slow player searches for every number from scratch, starting again from the centre of the screen. A fast player keeps one or two targets queued in memory and therefore almost never searches. The gap between the two approaches is worth tens of seconds on a run that lasts barely a minute.

And the necessary caveat: this game borrows the idea, it does not replace the protocol. A real Trail Making Test is done on paper with an examiner correcting errors live, and its interpretation depends on age and education. Your time here says nothing about your health: it says whether you have learned to read a grid one step ahead.

How it works

Twenty-five numbered discs are placed at random in the arena. The clock starts when you tap the first and stops when you clear the twenty-fifth. Every press out of sequence adds two seconds, shown separately in the bar. The final time, penalties included, is converted to a 0-100 score: ninety seconds scores zero, eighteen seconds scores one hundred, and lower is always better.