The game
Moles pop up, you hit them. Bombs also pop up, and hitting one costs you. 30 seconds.
- Mole — +10
- Consecutive hits — a combo bonus that climbs to a cap
- Bomb — −15, and it breaks your combo
The scoring is what makes this more than reflex. Because a bomb costs more than a mole pays and resets your streak, the correct strategy is not "hit everything fast" but "hit only moles, fast" — and those are genuinely different skills.
What it measures
This is a go/no-go task in an arcade costume. Go/no-go paradigms are a standard measure of response inhibition: a target you should respond to and a lookalike you should withhold from, with the timing tight enough that withholding is hard.
The clinically interesting error is not the mole you missed — it is the bomb you hit. Missing a target is usually attention; hitting a no-go signal is a failure to stop a movement already underway. Those are separate mechanisms, and only the second is inhibition.
Strategy
- Do not commit until you have identified the target. The whole difficulty is that a hole opening triggers a movement before you know what came out of it.
- Watch the field, not a hole. Fixating on one spot means everything else has to be found rather than noticed.
- Protect the combo. One bomb costs the 15 points plus the streak you had built — frequently 40 or 50 in total. Passing on a marginal mole is often correct.
- Hover, do not rest. Keeping your finger near the centre shortens every movement equally.
- Slow down when the pace rises. Counter-intuitive, but error rate climbs faster than opportunity does when things speed up.
Reading your result
If your score is low, work out which failure it was. Missing moles means your search or speed is the limit — that improves with practice quickly. Hitting bombs means inhibition, which improves more slowly and is the more interesting signal.
Most people's bomb hits cluster in the last ten seconds, as the pace rises and concentration fades. That late-game decay is normal and is itself a decent measure of sustained attention.
Frequently asked
Q. Is the bomb penalty too harsh?
A. Deliberately. If bombs cost the same as a mole pays, the optimal play would be to hit
everything, and the task would measure nothing but tapping speed.
Q. Do the positions follow a pattern?
A. No, they are random each time.
Q. Does this train reflexes?
A. It trains this game. Response inhibition does improve with practice on a specific
task, but transfer to other situations is the usual disappointment — see
does brain training actually work?
For inhibition without the motor speed component, try the Stroop task.