Whack-a-Mole

About Whack-a-Mole

Nine holes in a 3x3 grid. Moles pop up one or two at a time, never more, and you tap or click them before they duck back down. Thirty seconds, no penalty for a miss, and your score is simply how many you hit.

How it works

• Click or tap the stage to start the 30-second clock.
• A mole appears roughly every half a second to a full second — the exact gap is randomized every time — and stays up for somewhere between 0.65 and 1.15 seconds before ducking back down on its own.
• At most two moles are up at the same time. Never a full board.
• Hit a mole and it's gone immediately and counted. Miss it, or tap an empty hole, and nothing happens — there's no penalty.

When the clock hits zero, your score is the raw number of moles you hit — nothing subtracted, nothing averaged.

What the score does and doesn't tell you

This is a hit count, not a reaction-time measurement. We don't time how fast you hit any individual mole — we only count whether you got to it before it disappeared on its own. A mole up for 1.15 seconds is a much easier hit than one up for 0.65 seconds, and which one you get, and how many of each show up in your 30 seconds, is decided by the same random roll every time you play.

That randomness isn't a small effect. The spawn gap, the time each mole stays up, and how many holes are active at once all vary run to run by design — so the same player, with the same skill, can get a noticeably easier or harder 30 seconds purely by chance. Read a single score as one sample from a game with real variance built into it, not as a precise measurement of anything.

What counts as a good score

The Elite, Pro and Sharp labels under your result are tiers we picked for this game — Elite starts at 45 hits, Pro at 35, Sharp at 26, and down to Sleepy under 10. We made those cutoffs up. There's no study of whack-a-mole scores behind them, so read them as a game label, not a benchmark.

The live distribution of everyone else's scores, for whatever a still-small sample is worth, is on our stats page — that's real data from real attempts, unlike the fixed tiers above.

Reaction, anticipation, or both?

• Reaction: noticing a mole the instant it appears and hitting it before it ducks down.
• Anticipation: reading the rhythm of the game and having your hand already moving toward a hole before anything has appeared there.
• The final hit count mixes both together — a player who reads patterns well can out-score a player with faster raw reflexes, and the number alone won't tell you which happened.

That's part of why the game is fun and part of why it's a weak instrument for measuring anything precisely — a raw hit count folds reaction, guesswork and the random spawn timing into one figure with no way to separate them afterward.