Dot Chase: how to play and how scoring works

How long a round lasts

One run is 60 seconds of play, and that clock is never reset. Clearing the board does not give you a fresh minute — the timer is created once when the run starts and keeps counting through every board you clear. A run can also end well before the minute is up, because a single ghost contact ends it immediately. There is no second life: the game draws a life counter, but the death handler ends the run regardless of what that counter says.

Controls

Arrow keys or W, A, S and D to move. P pauses and M toggles sound. There is nothing else — no restart key, and no touch controls.

One thing to ignore: the game's own controls screen says "Space or P will pause the game". Space is not bound to anything and does nothing. Use P.

Turning is buffered, and this matters more than it sounds. If you press a new direction before you reach the corner tile, the turn is queued and taken as a diagonal cut — you come out of the corner already part-way into the new direction, without ever stopping at the centre. Press after you have entered the corner tile and you get the slower square turn instead. The window for the cut is roughly the first half of the corner tile, and while a cut is in progress any further direction press is discarded outright rather than queued. Over a 60-second run, taking corners early rather than late is one of the largest differences you can make.

How scoring works

Everything on the board has a fixed value. The only figure that changes during a run is the ghost ladder, which climbs while a power pellet is active and resets when the next one is eaten.

The ghost ladder, and the bonus most players never see

The ladder counts per power pellet, not per run. Eat a pellet, and the first ghost you catch is 200, the next 400, then 800, then 1,600. Eat the next pellet and it starts again at 200. Ordinary dots do not advance or reset it.

Catching all four ghosts on one pellet is a "perfect sweep", worth 3,000. Do that four times in the same run and you are paid a further 12,000 the instant the fourth ghost of the fourth sweep goes down. That tally is kept for the whole run rather than per board, so the four sweeps can be spread across several boards — and each board holds exactly four power pellets, so a single board can supply at most four. The bonus pays once; a fifth sweep adds nothing beyond its own 3,000.

For scale: 12,000 is worth 1,200 dots, and a board only holds 240. If you are chasing a high score, the ghost ladder is the whole game and the dots are mostly a way to move around.

How long you are actually safe after a pellet

Six seconds — four of solid blue, then ten flashes over the following two. The flashing is a warning, not a deadline: ghosts stay edible for the entire six seconds, flashing phase included. Players routinely waste the last two seconds by backing off as soon as the flashing starts.

Frightened ghosts pick a random legal turn at every junction, so their route genuinely cannot be predicted or herded. Unfrightened ghosts are the opposite — they navigate with real pathfinding toward their target tile rather than the straight-line guess the arcade original used, so dead-end and corner tricks carried over from that game do not work here.

Fruit, and why it is always cherries

A fruit appears each time your eaten-dot count reaches an exact multiple of 20, and stays for nine to ten seconds before vanishing silently. It is always worth 100, and it is always cherries.

The reason is that the level never advances. The game ships a full table of fruit values for 21 levels — 100, 300, 500, 500, 700, 700, 1,000, 1,000, 2,000, 2,000, 3,000, 3,000 and then 5,000 for the rest — but nothing in this build ever increments the level, so only the first row is ever reachable. Clearing the board resets the board, not the level.

You cannot outrun the ghosts

This is the single most useful thing to know, and it is the opposite of the arcade game. You move at 0.8, dropping to 0.71 while you are actually eating dots. The ghosts move at 0.85. Running along an uneaten dot line is therefore the slowest you ever travel, and a ghost in open corridor will close on you every time.

The reason is a quirk of this build: ghost speeds are read from a table clamped to level 3 while your speed is not, and the level never advances past 1. So you are playing a level-1 character against level-3 ghosts, permanently.

The exception is the side tunnel. A ghost on a tunnel tile is cut to 0.45 — roughly half your speed. The tunnel is the one place on the board where you are meaningfully faster than a chaser.

All four ghosts are also loose from the instant the run begins. There is no grace period while they leave the house, because the same level-3 clamp applies to how long they wait.

Where the ghosts are going

Ghosts alternate between scattering to their corners and chasing you, on a fixed schedule: 7 seconds scatter, 20 chase, 7 scatter, 20 chase, 5 scatter — and then chase for the rest of the run. Since a run is only 60 seconds, that last phase means the closing stretch is pure pursuit.

The pink ghost is worth watching. While it is eight or more tiles away it does not target you at all; it targets the midpoint between you and the nearest uneaten power pellet, measured from you. In practice it tries to sit between you and your escape. Only once it closes inside eight tiles does it come at you directly.

What actually raises your score

• →Buffer every turn before you reach the corner, not after. The diagonal cut is faster than the square turn and costs nothing.
• →Treat the ghost ladder as the score. Four sweeps in one run pays 12,000 on top of 12,000 already banked from the sweeps themselves.
• →Keep eating during the flashing phase. Those last two seconds are as edible as the first four.
• →Head for the tunnel when chased, not down a long dot line. Eating slows you to 0.71; the tunnel slows them to 0.45.
• →Do not expect the fruit to get better. It is 100 every time, so it is never worth a serious risk.
• →Remember the clock does not stop for a cleared board — clearing is not a reward, it is time spent.