Word Rescue

How to play

Type a word’s first letter to commit, then finish it. Inside a word, any other letter is wrong.

What it trains

Whole words rather than letters. Typing quickly is not producing keys quickly; it is producing familiar sequences without thinking about the keys at all. Words fall toward a line you are defending, and once you commit to one you finish it, which is what stops the game rewarding a scattergun.

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.

The levels

1. Short words
2. Common words
3. Longer words
4. Longest words
5. Crowded sky
6. Gale
7. Storm
8. Relentless