MyRin Speed Games: How to Get Faster Without More Mistakes

MyRin has a group of games where the clock is part of the challenge: Reaction Speed (Reflex in the app), Iroyomi, Hanafuda, Karuta and Kana Scout. Each one punishes mistakes, either by costing you a life, time or points.

That combination creates a familiar frustration. You try to go faster, and you start making errors. You slow down to be careful, and you run out of time. This article explains why that happens and how to improve speed and accuracy together instead of trading one for the other.

The speed-accuracy tradeoff

Psychologists have studied this for more than a century. When people are asked to respond faster, they make more errors. When they are asked to be careful, they slow down. This speed-accuracy tradeoff appears in almost every timed task.

The reason is simple. Your brain gathers evidence before it decides. Respond early and you decide on less evidence, so you are more likely to be wrong. Wait longer and you gather more evidence, but the time passes.

Pushing harder just moves you along the tradeoff: faster but sloppier. To genuinely improve, you need to move the whole curve, so you can be faster at the same level of accuracy. There are three ways to do that.

Three ways to move the curve

1. Decide what you are looking for in advance

A lot of time in speed games is spent working out what the task is, not doing it. If you know exactly what you are looking for before the stimulus appears, there is less to decide when it does.

2. Make the response automatic

If the same answer always uses the same finger and the same movement, you do not have to plan the movement. Only the decision remains. Consistent gestures turn a two-step task into a one-step one.

3. Practise at a pace where you are mostly right

Practising mistakes at speed makes them habits. Play at a pace where you are right almost every time, and let that pace rise naturally. Speed built on accuracy lasts. Speed built on guessing collapses under pressure.

Here is how those ideas apply to each game.

Reaction Speed

A green target appears somewhere on the screen and you tap it as fast as you can. You see each time in milliseconds and your average at the end.

Simple reaction time for a healthy adult is typically somewhere around 200 to 250 milliseconds, and it slows gradually with age. Our article on average reaction time by age has the details.

• Relax your hand. A tense hand is slower to move, not faster.
• Look at the centre of the screen, not where the last target appeared. Peripheral vision picks up a new target faster than a gaze you have to move.
• Do not anticipate. Tapping before the target appears costs more than it saves.

Iroyomi

A colour word appears in a different ink colour, and you tap the swatch matching the ink, not the word. This is the classic Stroop task. Reading is so automatic that the word fights your answer. See the Stroop effect explained.

• Name the ink before you look at the choices. Having the answer ready stops the word from taking over.
• Soften your focus. Looking slightly past the word makes the letters harder to read and the colour easier to see.
• Slow down after an error. One mistake often leads to another as you rush to recover. Take the next one deliberately.

Hanafuda

A card appears and you swipe it left or right into one of two categories before the timer runs out. A wrong swipe or a miss costs a life.

This game is the clearest example of the three principles:

• Lock in the rule before the round starts. Spend the first second reminding yourself of the two categories.
• Same finger, same motion, every time. Then the only thing you decide is the category, not the gesture.
• Commit. Hesitating costs the same life as a wrong swipe, and wastes time as well.

See the Hanafuda guide for more.

Karuta

The opening line of a classical Japanese poem appears, and you tap the card with its matching closing line before time runs out. If you miss, the correct card is revealed.

Karuta is a speed game, but it is also a memory game. The fastest players are not those who scan fastest. They are those who know the pairs, so a few words of the opening line are enough to know where to look.

• Focus on the first few words of the opening line. They are usually the most distinctive.
• Scan in rows, not at random.
• Learn from near-misses. If you keep almost choosing the same wrong card, those two lines are the ones to learn.

Real competitive karuta players memorise which syllables identify each poem, so they can move after hearing only the first one or two. Our article on competitive karuta explains the system.

Kana Scout

A grid of nearly identical katakana characters contains one that is different in shade, size or orientation. You tap it. Higher levels use bigger grids and smaller differences.

• Let your gaze drift. A soft scan of the whole grid uses peripheral vision, which is good at noticing something that does not fit.
• If that fails, zigzag. Scan row by row in a consistent pattern so you do not search the same area twice.
• Trust the pop. The odd one often catches your eye before you can say why. Check that spot first.

See the Kana Scout guide.

A note on fatigue

Speed games are the first to suffer when you are tired. Your reactions slow and, in games like Iroyomi, it becomes harder to suppress the wrong answer. If your scores suddenly drop well below your usual level, that is a signal to stop for the day, not to push harder. Training while exhausted mostly trains bad habits.

Play speed games early in a session, while you are fresh, and save calmer puzzles like the sorting games for later.