Start, five red lights and go

Start, lights out and go

Five red lights come on one by one, hold for a random moment, then go out together. Tap the instant they do, over three starts where the median counts, like on a Formula 1 grid, with the reaction time science of Donders behind it (Donders, 1868).

Reaction speed

Anticipation control

Play it live

Lights out and away we go.

Five red lights come on, then go out together after a random hold. Tap the instant they go out, over three starts.

25 s No account, no cookie

Space bar works too

What it asks of you

Start asks for reaction speed with a twist, the urge to anticipate. Five lights build a rhythm, and the hold before they go out is random. React too soon and it is a jump start.

So the game asks for two things at once, being fast and not guessing. Ready, but patient.

How to play

Five red lights come on, one per second.
They hold for a random moment, from a fifth of a second to three seconds.
They go out together, tap at that instant.
Tap before they go out, or faster than any human reaction, and it is a jump start.
You have three starts, and your score is the median time in milliseconds.

The research behind it

Reaction time has been measured since Donders in 1868 (Donders, 1868), and simple reaction time is among the steadiest measures there is (Woods et al., 2015b). Start keeps that solid core and adds the tension of a countdown.

The random hold is the clever part. It turns waiting into a skill, staying ready without jumping, the same discipline a racing start asks for.

On your weekly card

Start is the game of season 2, in free play from the start of the season.

It joins your Reflexes stat only if its reliability, measured during the beta, reaches the bar the app sets, a test retest correlation of 0.60. Until then it never counts on your card.

Questions

What counts as a jump start?

A tap before the lights go out, or less than 100 ms after, too fast to be a real reaction.

Is it like a real F1 start?

The light sequence is the same, five lights then out after a random hold. Here the reaction is your finger, not a car.

Where is the full test?

The F1 reaction test page has the format in detail.

Sources

Donders F.C. (1868, translated 1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica 30, 412 to 431. doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(69)90065-1
Woods D.L., Wyma J.M., Yund E.W., Herron T.J. (2015). The effects of repeated testing, simulated malingering, and traumatic brain injury on high-precision measures of simple visual reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, 540. PMC4637414. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00540

Written by the Headgame team

Updated 16 October 2026. Scientific reviewer not yet appointed. Every figure links to its source.