Ghost Race

How to play

The faint bar is you, on a run you already typed. Nothing leaves this device.

What it trains

Consistency against your own record. The ghost is a replay of a run you actually did, sample by sample, so it slows where you slowed. Racing it shows you the shape of your own typing rather than an average - and everybody slows in the third quarter, which is impossible to see any other way.

How progress works here

Each game has eight levels (Ghost Race has one for each of your best runs, up to five) and they unlock in order, so clearing one opens the next. A level is cleared by meeting its own target rather than by scoring highly, and a level you have beaten stays beaten. Your best score and the highest level you have reached are kept on this device, separately for each language.

Whatever you type here counts as practice. Keystrokes are attributed to the character the game asked for rather than the one that arrived, which is how a run of wrong keys still teaches the model something useful about the key you were reaching for. That is what makes these worth playing rather than merely diverting.

Five of the seven publish to a leaderboard, one board for each language and level, and what they rank is typing speed measured during the game, recomputed on the server from your keystroke timings - never the game score, which is a number a browser asserts and nothing can check. Skyfall and Rhythm Keys have no board: both set your pace themselves, so everybody who clears a level did it at the level speed, and a board would rank the level rather than the player.