About On the Dot
On the Dot is a free daily timing game that runs in the browser. Each round gives you a target time, such as 7.24 seconds. You start a stopwatch, see it run for a second and a half, and stop it when you think the target has passed, with nothing left on screen to count along to.
A round
- The round shows a target between 5 and 15 seconds, to the hundredth of a second.
- You press Start. The stopwatch counts up on screen for 1.5 seconds, then fades out over the next half second. It keeps running after the numbers disappear.
- You press Stop when you believe the target time has passed. The game shows the time you stopped at and how far off you were, in hundredths of a second.
- Five rounds make a game. At the end you see each round, your average and how your score compares with every finished game so far.
On a computer, the space bar starts and stops the clock and moves to the next round, and Esc ends the game. On a phone or tablet you tap the button.
Scoring
Each round is scored as a percentage of the target:
accuracy = 100 × (1 − distance from the target ÷ target)
Stopping at 7.50 seconds on a 7.24-second target is 0.26 seconds off, which is 3.6% of the target, so the round scores 96.4%. A round can't score below zero, however far off the stop is. Your game score is the average of the five rounds.
Dividing by the target keeps long and short rounds comparable. Half a second off costs 10 points on a 5-second target and about 3.6 points on a 14-second one. People's timing errors grow roughly in proportion to the interval, so a percentage treats short and long rounds alike: in the game's player data, median accuracy on 14-second targets matches 5-second ones.
Each round ends with a short verdict:
| Round accuracy | Message |
|---|---|
| Exactly on the target | On the dot. |
| 99.5% or more | So close. |
| 98% to 99.5% | Razor sharp. |
| 94% to 98% | Nice one. |
| 85% to 94% | Not bad. |
| 60% to 85% | Way off. |
| Below 60% | Wow, that was off. |
Targets
A target such as 8.00 or 6.50 seconds can be hit by counting, so the game never uses whole seconds or quarter seconds. Any target ending in .00, .25, .50 or .75 is thrown away and drawn again. You can still count, but the last fraction of a second always has to come from feel. Tips covers how to handle it.
The daily game
Five new targets appear every day at midnight Pacific time, and every player in the world gets the same five. They are worked out from the date by a fixed formula, so the leaderboard server can rebuild them and re-score every submitted run from its stop times instead of trusting the score a browser reports.
You can play the daily game as often as you like. The leaderboard keeps one entry per player per day: your best run. It resets with the new targets, so a first-time player can top the board on any day.
To put a score on the board you type a name of up to 24 characters. A Cloudflare Turnstile check confirms the run came from a person rather than a script.
Practice
Practice plays exactly like the daily game but draws five random targets from the same 5 to 15 second range. It is unlimited, and nothing from it reaches the leaderboard or your streak.
Challenges
After any game, Share result creates a message and a link. The link carries your five targets and your score. A friend who opens it plays the same five targets, sees the score to beat before starting, and finds out at the end whether they won.
Hall of Fame
The Hall of Fame is a separate all-time board on one fixed set of five targets: 12.21, 8.73, 9.01, 15.69 and 20.03 seconds. The set never changes and is the same for everyone, so every score on that board was earned on the same puzzle. It is the only place two of the targets run past 15 seconds.
Streak
The flame next to your score counts how many days in a row you have finished the daily game. Missing a day resets it. Practice games don't count towards it. The streak is stored in your browser, so it does not follow you to another device.
Accounts and data
There is no account and no sign-up. The game asks for a name only if you want a score on the leaderboard. Your streak and any game in progress stay in your browser's local storage. Anonymous gameplay events, such as rounds completed and how far off each stop was, are counted to see how the game is played; the privacy policy lists everything that is stored or shared. The game is free to play and is supported by ads.
Numbers
On the Dot went live on 2 August 2026. By early October players had completed more than 60,000 rounds. Player data shows what those rounds reveal about people's sense of time, and Sense of time explains the research behind them.