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An analog clock flashes up; tap the time it shows before its 10-second ring runs out. Twenty faces in four stages — the numbers thin out, then vanish, then the dial turns — scored to a hundredth of a point for speed.
Tap Start. A clock face appears with four times below it; tap the one the hands show, as fast as you can. The short hand is the hour and the long hand is the minutes. The coloured ring around the clock is your 10 seconds for that face. On a keyboard, keys 1 to 4 pick the buttons in reading order.
A run is 20 faces in four stages of five. Faces 1 to 5 show all twelve numbers and every time is on a five-minute mark. Faces 6 to 10 keep only 12, 3, 6 and 9, and about half the times fall within 10 minutes of the hour, where the hour hand sits almost on a number. Faces 11 to 15 have no numbers at all: there are 60 small ticks, a red ▲ marks 12, a thin red second hand sweeps round as a distraction, and the minutes can be anything. Faces 16 to 20 are the same, but the whole dial is turned by a random amount between 35° and 325°, so 12 is wherever the ▲ is.
The four choices are always two hours combined with two minutes, so every choice shares its hour with one other choice and its minute with another — you cannot work the answer out from the buttons, you have to read both hands. In the first two stages the second minute is 5, 10 or 15 minutes away; in stage 3 it is only 1 to 3 minutes away; in stage 4 the wrong hour is the one you would read if you assumed 12 was at the top, and half the time the wrong minute is too.
A correct tap scores 50 points plus a speed bonus that starts at 50 and falls by 5 points per second, reaching 0 at 10 seconds. A wrong tap costs 25 points. If the ring runs out, the face scores 0. After a correct answer the next face comes 0.65 seconds later; after a miss the right time is shown on the dial for 1.5 seconds. Only the time from the face appearing to your tap counts. Your total is shown to two decimal places (it cannot end below 0), and the result card shows how many you got right, your average reading time and the points from each stage.
Read the minute hand first and the hour hand second. The minute hand is long and points straight at a tick, so it settles two of the four buttons in one glance; after that the hour choice is between two neighbouring hours, and you only need to ask which side of a number the short hand sits on. Players who start from the hour hand often freeze on faces like 2:55, where the short hand is almost on 3.
That near-the-hour case is the core trap of stage 2 and later. The hour hand moves half a degree per minute, so at 50 minutes past it is only 5 degrees short of the next number. If the minute hand is in the left half of the dial, the hour is still the lower one even when the short hand looks like it has arrived; if the minute hand is just past 12, the short hand has only just left its number.
Once the numbers go, stop counting single ticks. Count in fives from the nearest quarter — 12, 3, 6 or 9 are the four long ticks — and then add the last one or two small ticks. In stage 3 the two minute choices differ by only 1 to 3 minutes, so that final count is where the points are. The red second hand is thinner and has a round counterweight; ignore it completely.
When the dial turns, find the ▲ before anything else and mentally rotate your head, not the clock. Then read the hands relative to the ▲, not to the top of the screen: the wrong hour among the buttons is exactly the one you get by trusting the top. Because a wrong tap costs 25 while a slow right answer still earns at least 50, it is never worth guessing early — but if you are truly torn between two buttons, a quick 50-50 guess is worth more than running out the ring.