Whack-a-Mole

30 seconds, as many moles as you can get

Moles pop up at random across the board and disappear again after a moment — click or tap them before they duck back down. Pure reflexes, no strategy, just how many you can catch before the clock runs out.

A carnival classic, digitized

Whack-a-mole has been a fixture of arcades and carnivals since the 1970s, and the format has become such a common shorthand for "an unwinnable game of endless popping problems" that the phrase gets used well outside gaming, in engineering and management, for exactly that reason. Here, there's no physical mallet to swing wildly — a light touch aimed precisely beats a frantic, imprecise one, since every hole only counts once per pop-up regardless of how many times you tap it.

Peripheral vision beats fixating on one hole

Staring at any single hole waiting for it to trigger is slower than keeping a loose, unfocused gaze across the whole board — human peripheral vision is genuinely good at catching sudden movement, and locking focus on one spot actively works against that instinct by narrowing what you're able to notice. The best scores tend to come from a relaxed, whole-board awareness rather than tense fixation on any one point.

Why 30 seconds is long enough to matter

A round this short means a single missed mole or one mistimed click carries real weight in the final score, unlike a longer game where an early mistake gets diluted by everything that follows — that's a deliberate design choice for a game this simple, since a longer round wouldn't add meaningful new challenge, just more time for the pure-reflex test to average out and feel less sharp.