60
seconds
Your runner sprints down a three-lane track and never stops. Hurdles, low bars, walls and gaps come at you, each with a word on its sign. Type the word in time and the runner clears it with a jump, a slide or a sidestep. Leave it too late and you crash straight through.
There are no movement keys in Dash. Every obstacle has a word floating above it, and the nearest one also appears in large type at the bottom of the screen with a label telling you what it will do: jump, slide, leap, go left or go right. Type the word and its sign turns green. From then on the move is locked in, and the runner performs it at exactly the right moment, however early you finished.
The word under the big one is the next sign coming. Good runs come from reading that word while you finish the current one, so there is never a pause between signs. If two signs are close together and you have not started either, typing the first letter of the second one switches to it.
You start with three hearts. Reaching an obstacle with its word unfinished costs one, slows you down and sends the obstacle flying. Run 700 metres without a crash and a heart comes back. Coins line the track along the path a clean move takes, so they also show how tidy your run was. Your score is the distance in metres.
The pace never levels off. The runner gets faster, the signs come closer together and the words get longer, so a run lasts about two to four minutes for most people. Advanced mode starts faster, uses longer words and makes a wrong letter restart the word.
Dash trains the skill that separates fast typists from average ones: looking ahead. Because the next word is always on screen, you learn to keep your eyes one word in front of your fingers. The accuracy and WPM on the results card are counted the same way as the main typing test.
No. A word counts the moment its last letter is typed, and stray spaces are ignored, so you can type straight from one word into the next.
The prompt flashes red and the miss counts against your accuracy, but on Standard you keep your progress in the word. On Advanced a wrong letter sends you back to the start of the word.
Each run picks one of three worlds at random: floating sky islands, a neon city of towers or a red desert canyon. All of them take their colours from your current theme.
Yes. The track and prompt scale down to small screens and the game works with an on-screen keyboard, though a physical keyboard makes the later stages much easier.