The Challenge plays a phrase; you play it back. Every phrase you echo correctly adds one note and starts again from the beginning. It grows for as long as focus and memory serve. There is no level, and no ending but a miss.
The notes are not a random walk. Every twelve of them form a twelve-tone row: all twelve pitches, each used exactly once. The next dozen is another row, and so on for as long as you last. No note ever follows itself, and a white flash marks each row completed.
The tonic is fixed for the whole run. It sits at 0, at the top of the clock, and it is the note the run opens on.
So the last notes of a row are the ones you have not heard yet — by the tenth you are choosing among three, and the twelfth is the one pitch left. Keeping track of what a row has already spent is worth as much as remembering the order.
The numbers are the clock face: 0 at the top, 1 to 11 around it, fixed. Pitch, colour and note name rotate underneath them when you change the tonic. The wheel starts dark and each pitch lights the first time it sounds, so the first row fills it in.
You get one mulligan — one free miss, replaying the same phrase. Miss again and the run ends where it stands. Set On a miss to Sudden death for the competition rule: one miss, one run.
Pause whenever you like. Save writes a small
.hkt file and Load puts you back on the phrase
you left, however long ago that was.
A run that has already ended can be saved too, and it comes back on the phrase that beat you — with your mulligan in hand again, if the mulligan rule is in force. A mistake costs you the run, not the work. This is a thing to be learned, and learning does not need a fatal punishment.
Your best run is kept on this device and announced at the moment you beat it.
Tab reaches the wheel, the arrow keys move around the clock, Enter or Space sounds a sector.