How to play
- Press any key to start. Attackers begin drifting down towards your ship.
- Type the word on one of them. The first letter locks on to it, and finishing the word destroys it.
- Nothing else needs pressing. No space bar, no Enter, and no mouse at any point.
- A wrong key breaks the lock and ends your combo, so take the nearest attacker first.
- An attacker that reaches your ship costs a shield. You have three, and then the flight ends.
- Press Escape at any point to pause.
Your two hands are measured separately
This is the part no other space typing game does. Words that your left hand does most of the work for attack down the left of the screen, right-handed words down the right, and the clock runs separately for each side. The scoreboard above the field shows a live words per minute for each hand, and the end screen reports both figures and says which one is behind.
It matters because your typing speed is governed by your slower hand, not by the average. A single overall number cannot show you that. You see a figure that will not budge and have no idea why, because the hand that is keeping up disguises the hand that is not. Measuring the two apart turns a vague problem into one specific thing to practise.
Most people have some gap. It is usually a few words per minute, which is nothing to worry about, and the game says so when the two are close. A gap of ten or more is worth acting on, and it almost always comes from the same cause: one hand learned the keyboard properly and the other has been improvising ever since.
How a word is assigned to a hand
By the ordinary touch typing split of a QWERTY keyboard. The left hand covers Q, W, E, R and T along with the rows above and below them; the right hand covers Y, U, I, O and P with their rows. The game counts which hand types more of the letters in a word and credits the word to that hand. A word split evenly goes to either side at random, so neither tally is quietly biased.
That is the same split the on-screen keyboard on this site uses to colour the keys, so what the game measures and what the lessons teach line up exactly.
Closing a gap between your hands
- Practise the slower hand on its own. Short, slow and deliberate beats long and frantic.
- Keep both hands resting on the home row, so the weaker hand stops travelling to find keys.
- Watch the screen, not your fingers. Looking down is what keeps a weak hand weak.
- Use the weak keys mode here, which builds the attackers from the characters you actually miss.
- Come back after a week of practice and compare the two figures again.
Four sets of words
- Classic uses everyday English, as a general typing test does.
- My weak keys builds the words from the characters you keep missing, read from your own record here.
- Job words uses dispatch, clerical, medical and accounts vocabulary.
- Numbers uses figures and reference codes, for data entry practice.
It starts gently
The first minute and a half is deliberately easy, because a game that overwhelms you in the first ten seconds teaches nothing. After that the attackers come faster and more often, tightening over the next three minutes. Waves are marked as you go, so you can see how far you got.
Tips for a longer flight
- Take the lowest attacker first. It is the one about to cost you a shield.
- Protect your combo. A run of clean words multiplies what each one is worth.
- Finish the word you started. Switching halfway wastes the letters you already typed.
- If one flank keeps getting through, that is your slower hand telling you plainly.
- Accuracy really does win here. A mistyped key gives an attacker time you cannot buy back.
Questions about the space typing game
Attackers drift down towards your ship, each one carrying a word. You destroy one by typing its word, and an attacker that reaches your ship takes a shield. Lose all three shields and the flight is over. It runs in your browser with no download and no account.
Every other one treats your hands as a single typist. This game does not. A word typed mostly with the left hand attacks down the left of the screen and a right-handed word down the right, and the game keeps a separate words per minute for each hand. At the end it reports both and names the slower one. No other space typing game tells you that, and it is usually the most useful thing you can learn about your typing.
Because your typing speed is set by the slower hand, not by the average of the two. Most people have a gap, often because one hand learned the keyboard properly and the other filled in by guesswork. An overall figure hides it completely: you simply see a number that will not move. Once you know which hand is behind, the fix is specific and quick, and this is one of the most common reasons a typing speed sits still for months.
By the standard touch typing split of a QWERTY keyboard, the same one the on-screen keyboard here teaches. Q, W, E, R, T and the letters above and below them belong to the left hand, and Y, U, I, O, P and their rows to the right. The game counts the letters in a word, and whichever hand types more of them is the hand the word is credited to.
Slow down and practise the weaker hand on its own for a while. Work through the lessons that drill its keys, keep your fingers resting on the home row, and look at the screen rather than at your hands. A gap of ten or fifteen words per minute usually closes within a couple of weeks of short daily practice, and your overall speed moves up with it.
It is free and needs no account. Game results stay out of your test history, your progress charts, the leaderboard and any certificate, because a game is not a measured typing test. The one thing carried over is the keys you mistyped, which are added to your weak-key list so your practice can target them.
Then take the measured test
A game shows you where the weakness is. A timed test tells you whether the practice worked. Use the two together: find the slower hand here, drill it in the lessons, then prove it in a test.