How to play Trace
A shape to draw with your finger — and you see nothing while you draw. Tap Done and your ink appears over the real shape, with a score for how close you came. One shape a day, three rounds, on the second shelf, outside the daily line-up.
Play today's Trace · Watch the gameplay demo
The rules
- Trace: the shape stays faint under your finger. Follow it.
- Recall: the shape shows for three seconds, then you draw it from memory on an empty board.
- Mirror: three seconds again, then its mirror image — flipped left to right.
- Your ink is invisible until you tap Done. The frame pulses while it is being taken. Lift your finger as often as you like; every stroke counts. Then your ink appears over the real shape, green wherever it lies on the shape.
- Each round scores 0–100 for the form of the drawing. Where it landed on the board and how big it came out do not matter — the drawing is slid and scaled to the shape before it is compared.
- One shape a day. Your rounds are saved as you finish them, so a refresh is not a second attempt; the archive holds every past day.
Strategy
- Memorize proportions, not pixels. Where does the roof peak? How wide is the door against the wall? Those are what survive three seconds.
- Fewer, longer strokes. A shape drawn in one or two sweeps keeps its proportions; twenty short dashes drift.
- Anchor a landmark and build from it. A blind hand drifts; starting each stroke from a corner you just drew keeps the parts together.
- For the mirror, turn the turns. Every “right” becomes a “left”; the ups and downs stay.
Scoring
The day is the three rounds weighted: trace a fifth, recall two fifths, mirror two fifths — the harder rounds are the game. A tracing scores near 100; a wobbly attempt with its proportions off lands around 70; a different shape altogether stays in the forties. Trace sits outside the daily line-up, so its score never moves your day’s total.
Full details on how scoring works.