Encircle Tips: Drawing Clean Loops Around a Moving Target

Updated October 2026

Encircle is a 60-second test of drawing under pressure. One gold dot and a handful of silver dots drift around the board, bouncing off its edges, and you score by drawing a closed loop that contains the gold dot and nothing else. It looks like a reflex game, but most points are won or lost by choosing when to draw and what shape to draw. This guide explains exactly how the game judges a loop, how the difficulty climbs, and how to turn that into a higher count.

How a loop is judged

Press anywhere on the board and drag. The game drops a point on your path roughly every 8 pixels. When you lift your finger, it joins your last point to your first one with a straight line, and that closed shape is your loop. While you draw, a faint dashed line shows that closing segment, so you can always see the shape you would get by letting go right now.

The game then checks the centre of every dot, and only the centre. A dot counts as caught if its centre is inside the loop, even when half of the dot is over your line. The outcomes are:

• Caught. The gold centre is inside and no silver centre is. You score a point.
• Silver. A silver centre is inside, with or without the gold. You lose 3 seconds.
• Miss. Nothing useful is inside. You also lose 3 seconds.

Very short strokes, under about six points or roughly 40 pixels of drag, are thrown away without any penalty. That makes an accidental tap harmless. A small loop that misses, however, still counts as a miss.

If your path crosses itself, the inside is worked out by counting crossings, so a pocket wrapped twice counts as outside. Keep loops simple and convex, and you never have to think about it.

How the difficulty climbs

Two things scale with your score. Both are set from your current score whenever the dots are placed again after a catch:

• Silver count. You start with 3 silvers. One more is added after every second catch, so there are 4 at a score of 2, 5 at 4 and so on, up to a maximum of 8 from a score of 10.
• Speed. Every dot moves at 75 pixels per second at the start, plus 4.5 for each point you hold. That is 120 at a score of 10 and 165 at 20, capped at 200 from a score of 28.

A small label in the top-left corner of the board shows how many silvers are in play. Dots always move in straight lines at a constant speed and bounce cleanly off the edges. The only randomness is where they spawn and which way they start out. Once you know a dot's heading, you can predict where it will be.

The best moment to draw is right after a catch

After every clean catch, all the dots are placed again at random, each heading in a new random direction. When it places the silvers, the game tries to keep each one at least 70 pixels from the gold, retrying up to 30 times before it gives up. For the first instant of a new round, the gold usually has a clear ring around it.

That ring does not last, since everything starts moving at once. The strongest habit in the game is to find the gold the moment a round starts and draw a tight loop straight away. A small circle around the gold, no wider than about three dot widths from its centre (roughly 65 pixels), often closes before any silver can cross into it. If a silver spawned close anyway, give up that round's opening and wait for a gap.

After a miss, by contrast, nothing is reset. The dots keep their positions and directions. That is fair, because you can try again on the same layout. It also means a miss caused by a crowded gold is likely to repeat if you redraw at once. Look first, then draw.

Use the walls and the space beyond them

A gold dot near an edge or corner is easier than one in open space, because the wall shields that side from silvers. There is one more advantage that many players never notice: once you have started a stroke on the board, your finger keeps drawing even if it slides past the edge. Points outside the board are still recorded. To catch a gold in a corner, start on the board near it, swing your finger out past the corner, and come back in. Your loop will wrap the dot with room to spare, and no silver can be in the part that lies off the board.

The same trick works along any edge. A U-shaped stroke that starts on the board, dips past the wall and comes back gives you a loop with one side outside the play area, where silvers never go.

Shape and speed of the stroke

Silvers move while you draw, so every extra tenth of a second is another chance for one to drift in. At the top speed of 200 pixels per second, a silver covers a dot's width in about a tenth of a second. Some practical rules:

• Draw the smallest loop that clearly contains the gold centre. A circle with a radius of three dot widths is quicker to finish than a sweeping shape.
• Lead the gold. Start your loop on the side the gold is moving towards, so it travels deeper into the loop while you draw, instead of out of it.
• Watch the dashed closing line. If a silver is about to cross it, lift early. A slightly lopsided loop that closes in time beats a perfect one that closes too late.
• Avoid very long strokes. The game keeps only the last 320 points, at least 2,500 pixels of path, and discards the start of anything longer. That can open up your loop in a way you did not intend.

Managing the 60 seconds

The clock runs on real time, so switching apps does not pause it. Each penalty takes 3 seconds off the clock. A miss is therefore worth roughly one catch at a good pace: if you average one catch every three seconds, a single miss erases one. That puts a clear limit on how much risk is worthwhile. A loop you think has a fair chance is not worth drawing. Only draw when you can see a clear lane.

Late in a run the board is busy, with 8 silvers and fast movement. Instead of chasing the gold through the crowd, wait for it to bounce into a corner or along a wall, then use the off-board trick. Patience costs about a second; a penalty costs three.

Common mistakes

The usual errors are drawing big loops "to be safe", which catch silvers more often than they rescue misses; chasing the gold from behind, so that it slips out of the closing gap; and redrawing instantly after a miss on an unchanged layout. A last one is starting the stroke on the gold itself. Your first point becomes part of the loop's edge, so start a little away from the gold, not on top of it. Your best score is saved on your device, and any run with at least one catch can go to the Hall of Fame from the end card.