Card Beat

Four sports cards sit in four lanes at the top of the screen. A pulse indicator travels across the bottom of each lane as the beat runs. When the pulse enters the HIT WINDOW (the highlighted ring), tap the card above that lane. Timing matters: hit inside the innermost ring for PERFECT (100pt), the middle ring for GREAT (50pt), the outer ring for GOOD (25pt), miss the window and the beat scores MISS (0pt). The full track plays out for 45 seconds on Normal difficulty with 15-60 beats depending on BPM.

EASY — 60 BPM (one beat per second), 30-second track, 4-card lane pool, wide timing windows (PERFECT ±180ms, GREAT ±280ms). Good for learning the feel. NORMAL — 100 BPM, 45-second track, 4-card lane pool, standard windows (PERFECT ±120ms, GREAT ±200ms). Default tier. HARD — 140 BPM, 60-second track, 4-card lane pool, tight windows (PERFECT ±80ms, GREAT ±140ms). Pushes into speed-chunking territory — you cannot look at individual cards at 140 BPM, you have to learn to READ THE LANE PULSE directly. Your best-score stat is tracked separately per difficulty.

Every beat scores independently. PERFECT = 100 points. GREAT = 50 points. GOOD = 25 points. MISS = 0 points AND breaks your streak multiplier. COMBO MULTIPLIER: every 10-perfect-or-great consecutive streak adds a +0.1× multiplier (cap ×3.0). A perfect run at Normal (45 beats × 100 × up to 3× multiplier) caps around 8,000 points. Grade curve: S 7,500+ / A 5,500-7,499 / B 3,500-5,499 / C 2,000-3,499 / D 800-1,999 / F 0-799.

Daily mode uses a date-seeded BEAT PATTERN and CARD POOL — every player on the same day faces the exact same track (same lane-by-lane beat sequence at the same BPM). Your score is directly comparable to other collectors' runs today, and your daily streak counts consecutive playthroughs. Free Play generates a fresh beat pattern on every attempt so you can practice rhythms without locking into the daily track. Both modes share lifetime stats.

Card Beat generates beat patterns with three shaping rules. First, AVOID 4+ IN A ROW on the same lane — distributes hits across lanes for engagement. Second, CLUSTER TWO-LANE HITS occasionally — creates satisfying dual-hit phrases. Third, REST-BEAT DENSITY varies by difficulty — Easy has ~30% rest beats (breathing room), Hard has ~10% (nearly every beat is a hit). The procedural generator enforces these rules while keeping the daily-seed deterministic.

Yes — the same reason Guitar Hero, osu!, and Beat Saber players talk about "chunking." When you first play Hard, every beat feels independent and the 140 BPM feels overwhelming. After 5-10 tracks at Hard, your brain stops processing each beat individually and starts recognizing 4-beat or 8-beat phrases as single chunks — at which point the BPM ceases to matter and you're responding to pattern rather than individual hits. Card Beat mirrors this: Daily-mode repetition builds chunking specifically on the Daily pattern, and your Daily-best tends to improve over a week even without changing anything else.

Card Echo (G-076) is a SEQUENCE MEMORY game — watch a pattern, reproduce it. Cognitive task: hold the sequence in working memory. Time pressure is AFTER the pattern ends. Card Beat is a RHYTHM TIMING game — beats arrive in real time, you respond to each one at the moment it enters the hit window. Cognitive task: temporal anticipation and motor-timing precision. Time pressure is DURING the beat. The two games are cognitively orthogonal — being good at Card Echo does not help Card Beat and vice versa. Together they cover working-memory and rhythm-timing cells of the cognitive-task matrix.

A generic rhythm game uses colored buttons that mean nothing. Card Beat uses four real sports cards per lane — each card has its sport color (baseball sky / basketball orange / football emerald / hockey cyan) which doubles as the lane-color cue. Between tracks, you incidentally learn the cards in the daily pool. Same low-pressure exposure pattern Card Echo uses, adapted for rhythm instead of memory.