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Check a sum, catch a letter, repeat — then recall every letter in order. A dual-task working memory test.
A sum appears with a clock on it — decide whether the number shown is right or wrong. The instant you answer, a letter flashes. Then another sum, another letter. When the set ends, tap the letters back in the order they appeared. Recall them all and the next set grows by one letter; miss any and you lose a life. Three lives. Getting a sum wrong costs points, not the run — the arithmetic is there to stop you rehearsing.
The letters are not the hard part; the gap between them is. Every sum is a demolition crew sent in to knock down whatever you just built, and the whole skill of this game is building something that survives the demolition. Most people try to hold the letters as sound — repeating F, K, R under their breath — and that is exactly the channel the arithmetic occupies, because reading a number and judging it uses the same inner voice. The letters vanish the moment you start calculating.
So build them somewhere else. Turn the sequence into a word or a near-word: F, K, R becomes "fokker", H, J, T becomes a shape you can see rather than say. Or place them: imagine the first letter on your left, the next in front of you, the next on your right. Spatial and visual codes survive arithmetic far better than verbal ones, because the sums are not competing for that space. This is the single change that moves most people from a span of four to a span of six.
Answer the sums quickly and honestly. The clock is not decoration — it shrinks as the sets get longer, and if you stall on a sum to protect your letters you will run the bar down and lose the item anyway. Two wrong sums cost six points, which is more than a whole early set is worth, so the cheap strategy of ignoring the arithmetic is measurably worse than just doing it. Read the operation first, get a rough size, and only then check the digits; most wrong answers are off by enough that you never need the exact value.
When you get to recall and one letter is missing, put something in the slot anyway and keep going. Position matters — a letter in the wrong slot scores nothing — so guessing preserves the alignment of everything after it, while leaving a hole shifts the rest and can turn one lapse into four. And when a set does break, look at the feedback row: if your misses cluster at the start you are losing them to the first sums, and if they cluster at the end you are recalling too slowly. Those two failures have opposite fixes.