How to play
- Press any key to begin. Letters are thrown up from the floor in an arc.
- Press the key shown on a throw to slice it. One key, one cut.
- Slice without a miss and the cuts chain into one blade stroke across the board.
- A letter that falls back past the floor costs a life. You have three.
- Take the one closest to falling first. The throws come faster as you go.
- At the end you are shown which moves between keys cost you. Escape pauses.
It times the moves, not the keys
This is the part no other ninja typing game does. The others throw letters at you and add up a score. This one measures the thing that actually governs how fast you type, which is not the keys at all but the moves between them.
That is not a hunch. The largest study of typing ever run, covering more than a hundred million keystrokes, found that whether a letter pair is typed by different hands or different fingers predicts typing speed better than the individual keys do. Your fingers are rarely slow at pressing a key. They are slow at getting from one key to the next, and which journeys cost you is personal: it depends on your hands, your habits and the fingering you taught yourself years ago.
Almost nobody has ever seen their own figures. The research has them in a dataset and no typing site will tell you yours. So this game times every move you make from one key to the next, throws away anything that was really a pause rather than a journey, and names the handful that genuinely cost you more than your usual.
The three kinds of move
- Same finger means one finger has to leave a key and travel to another, as in E to D. It is the slowest move there is and the one most worth drilling.
- One hand means two fingers of the same hand in succession, as in A to S. These are usually quick, especially rolling inwards.
- Hand to hand means one hand then the other, as in T to H. This should be your fastest move of all, because the second hand can start moving while the first is still finishing.
The reading ahead test
The single most useful line on the end screen compares your hand to hand moves against your moves within one hand. Going hand to hand should be quicker, because your two hands can work in parallel: while the left finishes one letter the right is already travelling to the next.
If it comes out the other way round, the hold-up is not in your fingers. It means you are reading only as far as the key you are typing, so the other hand has nothing to prepare for and has to start from a standstill each time. That is a reading habit rather than a hand problem, and the fix is to let your eyes run a few characters ahead of your hands. It feels wrong for a day and then it does not.
Four sets of keys
- Letters throws the twenty-six letters, which is where most of your typing happens.
- My weak keys leans towards the characters you keep missing, read from your own record here.
- Numbers throws the digit row, for anyone practising data entry.
- Mixed adds digits and punctuation, so the journeys cover the whole board.
How the timings are kept honest
Because the letters come one at a time, the gap between two keys also holds the moment spent spotting the next letter in the air. That is roughly the same however the letter is typed, since finding it on screen has nothing to do with which hand reaches it, so it adds a near constant to every pair and cancels out when the three kinds of move are set against each other. The comparison is what carries the insight, and it survives intact; the individual pair timings are shown for what they are, slowest to reach rather than pure travel. Beyond that, anything longer than a second and a bit is thrown away as a pause rather than averaged in, a pair has to be seen several times before it is named, and your usual move is the middle of every timing rather than the average, so a few fumbles cannot drag the baseline up to meet them.
How to get quicker between keys
- Drill the named pairs on their own, slowly, until the travel stops feeling like a reach.
- Let your eyes run ahead of your hands. It is the cheapest speed there is.
- Keep your fingers resting on the home row so every journey starts from the same place.
- For a stubborn same finger pair, check your fingering. Many people fix E to D by using a different finger for one of them.
- Come back after a week and see whether the same pairs are still being named.
Questions about the ninja typing game
Letters are thrown into the air and you slice each one by pressing that key before it falls back past the floor. Slicing without a miss chains the cuts into a single blade stroke across the board. You have three lives. It runs in your browser with no download and no account.
The others throw letters at you and keep a score, and that is the whole of it. This one times the moves between your keys. The largest study of typing ever run, over a hundred million keystrokes, found that whether a letter pair is typed by different hands or different fingers predicts typing speed better than the individual keys do. Your fingers are rarely slow at pressing a key; they are slow at getting from one key to the next. This game measures every one of those journeys and sorts them by why each is hard.
Same finger, where one finger has to leave a key and travel to another, which is the slowest move there is. One hand, where two fingers of the same hand follow each other, which is usually quick. And hand to hand, which is normally the fastest of all, because the second hand can start moving while the first is still finishing. Each slow move is labelled with its kind, so you can see not just which journeys cost you but why.
That is the most useful thing this game can tell you. Going hand to hand should be your quickest move, because your two hands can work in parallel. If it is slower than moving within one hand, the hold-up is not your fingers at all. It almost always means you are reading only as far as the key you are typing, so the other hand has nothing to prepare for. The fix is to let your eyes run a few characters ahead of your hands.
They are the two halves of the same picture. The A to Z game times each of the twenty-six letters on its own, so it finds the keys you are slow at. This one times the journeys between keys, which is where typing speed actually lives. A letter can be perfectly quick on its own and still cost you every time it follows a particular other letter.
It is free and needs no account. Rounds 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 letters you mistyped, which are added to your weak-key list so your practice can target them.
Pair it with the A to Z run
The A to Z game finds the keys you are slow at. This one finds the journeys between them. Run both and you have the whole picture of what your hands are doing, then take a timed test to see what fixing it was worth.