Whack-a-Mole

What is Whack-a-Mole?

Classic carnival whack-a-mole, motion-controlled. Six holes in a 2×3 grid; cute cartoon moles pop up at random — swipe a hand fast over a visible mole to whack it. Slow waves don't count, only deliberate fast swipes. 60-second timed round; misses don't end it. Chain whacks within a second for a combo multiplier. HARD mode shortens mole visibility, speeds up spawns, and adds a chance of two moles popping at once.

The badge in Whack-a-Mole

There is one badge here, kept on your own device and shown on the 🏆 Achievements panel on the home page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account to make.

• Mole Hunter — Score 30 in Whack-a-Mole.

How to play Whack-a-Mole

1. Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks. Pick Normal or Hard first — each keeps a separate best score.
2. Set yourself up so the whole grid is inside your reach. Six holes sit in the grass across the middle of the picture, three along and two deep, the outer columns about a fifth in from each side. None is in a corner.
3. The picture is mirrored, so reach for a mole where you see it. After the three-second countdown the sixty-second clock starts, and the first mole is already on its way up.
4. Sweep a hand across the middle of a mole. A quick pass, not a slow reach. You can catch one while it is still rising, but the moment it drops back it stops counting — so take whichever popped up first.
5. At sixty seconds you get Time up! with your score and how many moles you got. SPACE starts another minute, H goes home, M silences the music, F goes fullscreen.

If moles pop and drop untouched however hard you swipe, your hand is probably too small in the picture: come closer, or hold it up nearer the camera. If there is no picture of your room behind the grass at all, the camera never started, and camera help will say why in one click.

What a good minute looks like

Ten points a mole, and that is the only thing on the board. Four things separate a modest minute from a big one.

• The chain runs on a one-second clock. Hit a mole within a second of the last one and the multiplier steps up, to a ceiling of six: from the sixth of an unbroken run onwards, each is worth 60 rather than 10. The sixty-second clock in the corner is not the one deciding your score — the one second since your last hit is.
• A run ends because you waited, not because you missed. Nothing here subtracts: no lives, no penalty for swiping at an empty hole, no way for the number to go down. A wild swipe costs only the moment you spent on it, which makes hesitating the most expensive habit in the game.
• The spot that counts is smaller than the mole. The patch that registers a hit sits in the middle of the body, roughly two thirds of its width. Clip the edge of one and it will often carry on grinning. Sweep through the nose, not past an ear.
• Take the oldest mole first. In Normal a mole is hittable for about a second and two thirds while a fresh one arrives every half second to a second, so there is usually more than one up. The one that popped earliest is about to disappear; the newest can wait, and waiting for it is how chains break.

Two moles up at once is the easiest chain there is: one sweep across both lands them well inside the second.

Where to stand, and who else can join in

The holes never move, which makes this different from the games where you chase something: your position in front of the camera, not your reflexes, sets the ceiling. Two things pull against each other.

• Far enough back that all six are in reach. The two rows of moles show up around a third and two thirds of the way down the picture. Too close and the far column is off the side of the frame, and you spend the minute leaning instead of swinging.
• Close enough that your hand still reads. Too far away and swipes stop landing, because a hand that small on screen no longer counts as a sweep. Around arm's length from a laptop is where most people settle.
• Sitting is fine. Nothing here wants floor space. A chair at a desk with both hands up is the normal way to play it, which is why it still works in a cramped room where the running games do not.

A second player is an asset rather than a nuisance. Each hole is judged on its own patch of the picture, so two children side by side both really do whack: one child can take the left of the grid and the other the right, and every hit feeds the same score and the same chain. Nothing is taken in turns, which is why this one works pointed at a whole room.

Hard mode, exactly

• Moles stay up for one second instead of one and a half. Counting the moment spent rising, the window shrinks from about a second and two thirds to a bit under a second and a quarter.
• They arrive close to twice as often. A new mole every 0.3 to 0.65 seconds, against 0.55 to 1.1 seconds in Normal.
• Three times in ten, two pop at the same instant. Normal never does this at all.

The part nobody expects is that Hard is where the bigger scores live. The chain rule and its ceiling of six are identical in both modes, but landing a hit inside every one-second window is far easier when moles overlap constantly than when you wait for the next one. Hard takes away thinking time, not points.

For a parent or a teacher

It is exactly one minute. Sixty seconds from the end of the countdown, with the clock turning red for the last ten. That fixed length is the practical reason to reach for this one: a turn each for a queue of children takes exactly as long as the arithmetic says.

It is in the class Brain Break. The five-minute Brain Break on the home page runs five games back to back, a minute each, and Whack-a-Mole is the third — one game, one complete round, nothing to set up. It is there because it works with a crowd.

Nobody can lose it. No lives and nothing subtracts, so a child who misses every mole for a full minute still finishes with a cheerful Time up! rather than a failure. It is listed from four, the commonest starting age among the games here, and the Mole Hunter badge unlocks at thirty points — three moles, deliberately within reach of a first go.

Noise and space. Bouncy backing music, a wooden thump on every hit, and a bell on top once a chain reaches three. M silences the music; the thumps stay, and for a young child they are the confirmation the swipe worked. No floor space needed.

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