How to Play Kityt, a 15-Round Online Reaction Time Game

Kityt is a reaction test that everyone takes at the same time. Fifteen rounds, each showing the same left-or-right prompt on every screen simultaneously, and a window to answer in that shrinks from two seconds down to one as the game goes on. Miss it and the round scores nothing.

It is short on purpose. The whole thing takes about three minutes, which makes it the game to reach for when a meeting has five minutes left rather than twenty. The scoring is honest about what it measures: accuracy first, then average reaction time on the rounds you actually got right, so mashing both sides never pays.

How to play Kityt

1. A host creates a room and shares the link. Up to eight players join and each picks one of eight kitten avatars.
2. The host starts the game. All players see the same prompt at the same moment - this is not turn-based.
3. Press the side the prompt matches before the reaction window closes. Early rounds give you two seconds; by round fifteen you have one.
4. A wrong press or a missed window scores nothing for that round. There is no penalty beyond the lost point.
5. After round fifteen the leaderboard is revealed, ranked by accuracy first with average reaction time as the tiebreaker.
6. Everyone then watches the same replay: the kittens walk an obstacle course, taking a hit at every round their player got wrong. The host can rematch the whole room with one button, no re-sharing the link.

Strategy and tips

• Rest your thumbs or fingers on both answer targets before the round starts. Most lost time is travel time, not thinking time.
• Do not try to predict the prompt. The sequence is random, and a guess that lands early still has to be the right side - the expected value is worse than simply reacting.
• Accuracy is the primary ranking key, so a careful player who gets fifteen right beats a fast one who gets thirteen. Speed only breaks ties.
• The window shrinks gradually rather than suddenly. The failure mode is relaxing into the pace of round three and being half a beat late by round twelve.
• On a phone, hold it in two hands with a thumb over each side. One-handed play costs you more than any amount of concentration wins back.

What makes Kityt different

Most reaction-time tests on the web are a single click on a green square, taken alone, producing a number with no context. Kityt makes it a race that a whole room runs at once, which turns a lab measurement into something worth doing together.

The post-game replay is the other half of it. Rather than a bare table of milliseconds, every player's round-by-round result is redrawn as their kitten walking a course and stumbling at each mistake, so a group can see at a glance who fell apart in the last five rounds.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Free browser games to play with your team, no signup: Games that start in one click, work on a call, and never ask anybody to make an account.
• Free Jackbox alternatives you can play in a browser: Party games with the Jackbox shape - shared screen, everyone plays on their phone - without the purchase or the stream.