Darkroom

Darkroom is a free online time estimation game set in a photographer's darkroom under a red safelight. The developer hands you a print and a time, say "pull at 11.5 seconds". Tap to slide the paper into the tray, then count in your head: there is no clock on screen. Tap again to pull it out. The photo itself is the feedback. Pull too early and it comes out pale and flat, pull too late and it goes dark and muddy, pull on the second and it is crisp. It is a test of your internal clock, it runs in your browser with no download, and a day's five prints take about a minute and a half, which makes it one of our favourite quick games and timing games.

Every day brings five prints, and they get harder. The first is only three seconds long and a metronome on the shelf ticks once a second, so all you have to do is pull on the third tick. After that you are on your own: a print of five or six seconds in a silent room, then one of eight or nine seconds while the enlarger's fan hums and swells, then the two hardest, eleven to twenty seconds, each with a distraction that tries to pull your counting off. A cheap wall clock that runs fast ticks away on the wall, and a valve radio plays a song whose beat is almost, but not quite, one beat a second. The skill is to ignore them and keep your own count.

After each print the white inspection light comes on and you see exactly how you did: your time against the target ("11.83 s, 0.33 s late"), a stamp from ON THE DOT and PERFECT PRINT down to WASHED OUT or BURNT, and a test strip of everyone's pull times for the same print today, with the target and your pull marked on it. Played for fun, Darkroom gives everyone the same five prints each day, so you also see how many of today's printers you were closer than, the crowd's middle time and how many of them pulled early. At the end, the contact sheet lays out your five prints exactly as you developed them, with your times, your best print circled in grease pencil and your total, ready for a screenshot or the share button.

Scoring is about the size of your error compared with the target, so every print counts the same. Pulling on the very tick is worth 1,000 points; 1% off is 842, 5% off 500 and 10% off 312, so missing a three-second print by 0.3 seconds costs as much as missing a twenty-second print by two seconds. Five prints make a run of up to 5,000 points. Times are measured in sixtieths of a second, exactly the ticks between your two taps, and shown rounded to hundredths. Ranked runs are re-simulated on our servers, which puts Darkroom among our skill games and brain games; the crowd comparison is just for fun and never changes a score.

It plays the same everywhere: tap anywhere on a phone, click anywhere on a computer, or press the Space bar. One button, two presses per print, so it sits happily among our one-button games, mobile games and PC games. Come back tomorrow for five new prints.