About iptsi Mole
iptsi Mole is a reaction game played on a nine-hole grid. A target appears in one of the holes, stays for a moment, and drops away again. Tap it while it is up and you score; let it go and you lose one of your three lives. Pink bombs appear alongside the targets and cost a life if you touch them, so the game is as much about holding back as about speed.
The difficulty curve is deliberately gentle at the start. The first targets stay up for well over a second and only one is on the grid at a time. As you score, targets appear more often and stay up for less time, and bombs become more common, so the window you have to both see and decide keeps shrinking. Your score is a fairly honest measure of how long your attention held.
How to play
- Tap a glowing teal target while it is up to score. A ring around it counts down the time you have left.
- Leave the pink bombs alone entirely. Touching one costs a life.
- Missing a target that times out costs a life as well.
- Each target you hit in a row builds a combo, and the combo multiplies what the next target is worth.
- Three lives lost ends the run.
How it was built
Everything you see is drawn at runtime on a single canvas: the holes are circles, the targets are discs with an arc for the countdown, and the particles are simple physics. There are no images and no sound files — the blips are generated with the Web Audio API — so the whole game is one HTML file that requests nothing from the network.
Because the countdown is drawn rather than implied, the game never punishes you for something you could not see. That is the one rule the design follows: if a target is up, how much time is left is always visible.
Why it is free
iptsi builds these games in-house and owns them outright. They are here to be played, and to show the kind of title that works in the open web: instant to start, understandable in seconds, and light enough to run on a low-end phone. There is no account, no download, and no advertising on this page. Your best score is kept in your own browser.