Tap Gallop: how to play and how scoring works

How long a round lasts

60 seconds, or until your score reaches 100 — whichever comes first. Because green dots are the only thing that raise the score and each is worth exactly one point, 100 is also the highest score the game can produce. One entry buys exactly one run: the PLAY AGAIN button on the game-over screen calls a function that deliberately does nothing.

Controls

Clicking or tapping a dot is the only input in the game. There is no keyboard control, no swipe, and no handler on the background — a click that lands on empty space does nothing at all, costs nothing, and is simply ignored.

How scoring works

Three dot colours, three fixed values. There is no score floor, so a careless run can and does finish below zero.

The horse is not racing

Despite the name and the track, your horse has no movement of its own and the three rivals cannot beat you. Your horse's position is recomputed from your score every time you click a dot — it is a progress bar drawn as a horse. Hit a red dot and it visibly slides backwards, because the score went down.

Which of the four horses is highlighted as yours is picked at random at the start of each run, and has no effect on anything. The rival horses advance on their own timer, but the run is capped at 60 seconds and they cannot finish within it.

Orange dots are just green dots you were too slow for

Nothing ever spawns orange. A green dot stays green for 1.5 seconds, turns orange for the next 1.5 seconds, then disappears.

That means hesitating over a green dot is a three-point swing: the same dot that was worth +1 becomes worth −2. If a dot has already turned orange, leave it — it will vanish on its own in under a second and a half, and clicking it only helps if you enjoy losing points.

The field is deliberately stacked against you

Every 400 milliseconds the game spawns a new batch, and it asks for 20 to 22 red dots against 0 to 2 green. Red is requested roughly twenty-one times more often than green. Fewer reds actually reach the screen than are requested, because each one gets a limited number of attempts to find a free position, but the ratio on screen is still heavily red.

Greens also carry a handicap that reds never do. Whenever a green spawns and there is already at least one dot on the board, there is a 30% chance it is placed at the exact position of an existing dot and drawn behind it. All the dots are the same size, so the cover is complete: the green is invisible and unclickable, and since reds vastly outnumber greens, the dot hiding it is almost always red. Click there and you take the red's −3.

In other words, roughly three in ten greens never become available at all, and the attempt to take one you thought you saw is actively punished.

What this means for how you play

This is an accuracy game wearing a reaction game's clothes. Clicking fast is how you lose: the field is 90%-plus red, so an untargeted click is far more likely to cost three points than gain one.

The realistic ceiling is also much lower than the 100 the game allows. Green supply is capped at 0 to 2 per 400ms batch, minus the 30% that spawn hidden — so even perfect play is limited by how many greens the game offers, not by how quickly you can click.

What actually raises your score

• →Never click speculatively. An untargeted click is overwhelmingly likely to land on a red.
• →Take greens immediately — at 1.5 seconds the same dot flips from +1 to −2.
• →Once a dot is orange, leave it. It disappears on its own well within two seconds.
• →Ignore your horse and ignore the rivals. The horse is your score; the rivals cannot reach the finish inside 60 seconds.
• →Expect some greens to be unclickable. Roughly 30% spawn hidden behind another dot, usually a red — if a green will not register, stop stabbing at it.
• →Doing nothing scores zero, which beats a negative. When the field is solid red, waiting is a real move.