Maths Blitz

Maths Blitz puts you in the chair of a space station nobody has redecorated since 1974. The console curves away in front of you in green and amber phosphor, there is a porthole on the left with a gas giant and a slowly turning station outside, and a small robot co-pilot watches from a screen in the middle. A problem clatters onto the split-flap board at the top — seven times six, or forty per cent of eighty, or twelve plus eight, then times three — and you have as long as the clock gives you.

There are two ways to answer and you can switch whenever you like. Four bevelled buttons give you one right answer and three wrong ones built out of the mistakes people actually make: off-by-one, swapped digits, the neighbouring times table, the wrong operation entirely. The number pad gives you the digits, a backspace, a sign key and a big green enter, and it can submit on its own the moment you have typed enough digits. Every key has real travel, and the co-pilot gives you a thumb for a right answer, a bead of sweat for a wrong one and a pair of sunglasses once you are five in a row.

Five ways to play. Blitz is sixty seconds with a streak multiplier that climbs every five right and a three-second penalty for every miss, and it quietly raises or lowers the difficulty to match how fast you are going. Countdown starts you with ten seconds and pays you more time for every correct answer, but the station gets stingier the longer you last. Ladder is a hundred problems, ten per level, three lives. The Daily Blitz gives everyone the same set of problems on a given day and keeps a streak for coming back. Duel splits the screen face to face for two players on one phone, first to fifteen. Problems run from adding inside twenty, through the times tables and exact division, to brackets, two-step chains, missing numbers, percentages, fractions and finally answers that go under zero. Practise just one operation if you want to — there are switches on the console for that — and your bests are kept per mode and per level in your browser.