How to get faster at Tracing Game — from your first run to sub-20 seconds
Across the tens of thousands of games played on this site, the average completed run takes roughly 25 seconds. Here is a realistic ladder to measure yourself against:
Times under 40 seconds are announced in the news ticker on the main page, so that is a nice first milestone to chase.
The single biggest beginner mistake is letting the eyes jump around the grid chaotically. When you cannot find a number, your eyes tend to revisit the same cells repeatedly while skipping others entirely. Instead, sweep the grid in a fixed pattern — left to right, row by row, like reading a page. A disciplined sweep is slower per cell but never wastes a look, which makes it much faster overall.
This is the technique that separates sub-30 players from everyone else. The moment your eyes have found a number, they are done with it — your hand can finish the click without visual guidance. Use that time to start searching for the next number. The goal is a pipeline: eyes always one number ahead of the hand. If your run alternates between "click… search… click… search", you are losing almost half of your potential speed.
You do not need to look directly at a number to spot it. With practice, you can process a 3×3 neighborhood around your focus point in a single glance. Try to widen your attention and take in whole regions instead of single cells — the number you need is often caught in the corner of your eye.
While sweeping for number 7, you will inevitably pass 8, 9 and 12 on the way. Do not throw that information away. Even a rough memory ("9 is somewhere top-right") turns a future full-grid search into a quick confirmation. Top players build a mental map of the grid during the first few sweeps and barely search at all in the second half of the run.
Everyone has the moment where a number simply refuses to be found. The instinct is to panic and scan faster and faster in a shrinking circle. Resist it: take one deliberate full-grid sweep instead. One disciplined second beats five frantic ones.
Short daily sessions beat long occasional ones. Visual scanning speed improves measurably within a week or two of regular practice.
In Blind (BLD) mode you memorize the grid first, then click the numbers from memory once they are hidden. It is a completely different challenge — raw scanning speed matters less than structured memorization.
In Duel Mode both players race on the identical shuffled grid, so the better scanner wins — but psychology plays a role too.
Yes, some layouts are friendlier than others — consecutive numbers that happen to cluster together save travel time. Over many runs it evens out, which is why the leaderboard rewards consistency: the more you play, the more likely you catch a lucky layout on a day when your technique is sharp.
Both can be very fast, but they favor different styles. A mouse allows precise small movements and works well with tight lookahead; a touchscreen lets you use two thumbs or a hovering finger, which some top mobile players exploit brilliantly. Play the device you can practice on most.
Plateaus almost always mean you are grinding full-speed runs instead of practicing technique. Slow down, isolate one skill (usually lookahead), exaggerate it for a session, and the plateau typically breaks within a few days.
Number-grid search tasks similar to this one (such as Schulte tables) have long been used to train visual scanning, peripheral awareness and attention. We make no medical claims — but the skills clearly transfer to activities that reward fast visual search, from speedcubing to ball sports to speed reading.