Tempo

📖 Strategy guide: How to keep time in Tempo: why you rush, what drift costs, and how to stop it

How to play

Tap the big ivory key (or press Space) to start a round. After a short count-in the brass pendulum swings for four bars of four beats, and the amber lamp flashes on every note you will have to play. Then the metronome freezes. Keep the beat going: tap the next eight notes in complete silence. Taps during the four bars are practice and are not scored. The meter then shows your mean timing error in milliseconds, and a timeline shows each tap against the true beat.

Sound is off unless you switch on the click; the game never plays sound by itself. If your phone or screen adds a delay, the optional Calibrate round has you tap along with twelve visible beats, takes the median gap, and corrects every later tap by that amount. The correction is shown on screen and saved with your score, and ✕ removes it.

Daily, levels and challenges

A set is five rounds, and your score is the five mean errors added up: lower is better. Normal is the daily set, the same for everyone, changing at midnight UTC; it uses straight beats from 60 to 160 BPM. Easy keeps to 80 to 120 BPM. Hard adds swing (long-short pairs), off-beats (tap between the clicks) and a gear change, where the last bar plays a new tempo and a bell rings. ⚔️ copies a link to your exact set, 🎲 deals a random one, ↻ restarts.

How the rounds are made

Every set is built from a seed: one tempo from each of five tempo bands, shuffled, so every set covers slow and fast. A tap more than 250 ms from its note counts as a miss, and every miss or extra tap costs 250 ms, so tapping wildly cannot beat keeping time. After the metronome stops, nothing on the page moves or plays until the round ends, and switching tabs stops the round so it can be replayed.

Tips

• Tap along for the last bar of the lead-in so your hand is already moving when the beat stops.
• Many players speed up in silence. If the timeline shows a drift to the left, relax into the slow tempos.
• Nod or sway on the beat: a body rhythm keeps time better than your eyes.

Designed and built by the Eigengames team; every round is generated and scored by our own code.