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3
Two home screens to choose from. Switch freely — nothing else changes, and your child’s progress is untouched either way.
Short answers about how the game teaches, what the numbers mean, and what does and does not leave this device. Tap a question to open it.
An arcade space shooter your child flies by touching the screen — but the battle keeps stopping for a Brain Boost: a maths question, read out loud, answered by shooting the right bubble.
The maths is not a side quest bolted on to a game. Correct answers are how everything worth having is earned here: stars, spaceships, rescued friends, and planets in the Math Galaxy.
No. Every question, prize, story panel and instruction is spoken aloud by the announcer, and the pictures carry the rest, so a pre-reader can play alone.
If you need quiet, the speaker button in the corner of the home screen mutes everything, and a mute button is in the corner during play. The game still works silently — but a child who cannot read yet will need the voice.
The name screen asks “How old are you?” with four bands: 4 and under, 5–6, 7–8 and 9–12. It quietly sets four things:
You can overrule the speed at any time with the Alien Speed picker before a game (CADET / ACE / LEGEND). Once a grown-up has chosen a speed, the age band stops steering it.
Yes — and it eases off just as readily. The game keeps a private skill level for your child and watches the last ten answers: at about 80% correct it nudges the level up (faster still when answers come in under four seconds), and below 50% it drops the level quickly to protect confidence.
Adding comes first; taking away joins in once the level is high enough. Both the numbers and the answers stay between 1 and 20 so the announcer can say every one of them out loud.
Roughly one question in three is a deliberate revisit of a fact they got wrong earlier, brought back after a gap rather than straight away.
The battle freezes and dims, the question fills the middle of the screen in huge letters and is read aloud, and three answer bubbles drift down. Your child taps the one they want; the ship glides underneath it and fires a single shot.
They get 3 shots and a countdown set by their age band (25 / 20 / 15 / 12 seconds). A right answer pays 250 stars, and every second correct answer earns a BOOM to save for a tight moment. Three correct answers bring back a lost heart (up to three), three in a row triggers a Hot Streak bonus, and from the fourth in a row they get a trace-the-answer moment.
Once one finishes, the next is armed 9 to 15 seconds later. Boss waves have none.
Tapping a wrong bubble costs one of the three shots, breaks the streak, and is recorded — it was a real answer, and it shows up in the Report Card.
Running out of shots or out of time is treated completely differently. The announcer simply says what the answer was, the battle hands back, no life is lost and nothing at all is recorded against your child. Hesitating costs them the reward, never a heart, and no child ever loses the game because of the maths.
Math Galaxy is a progress board, not a level picker. Each planet is one family of facts — Adding to 5, Adding to 10, Doubles, Adding past 10, Take away to 10, Take away past 10 — and it fills and lights up as your child learns the facts inside it. Three more planets (Times 2s, 5s and 10s) appear once multiplication is in play.
A single fact, say 7 + 6, only counts once it has been recalled correctly on four separate occasions, and the game deliberately waits longer before each re-check — one wave, then two, then four — so it is testing memory rather than the last few seconds. One wrong answer sends that fact back to the start.
Each planet needs between 5 and 8 of its facts at that standard (Adding to 5 needs 6, Doubles 5, the rest 8; each times-table planet needs 6). Finishing one pays 1,500 career stars and unlocks its matching Cosmic Colours ship. Finishing every planet opens the Legendary ships.
There are 21 ships in three sets, and the set tells you what earns it:
Rarer ships carry perks — rapid fire, triple shot, a shield each wave, more BOOMs. The aliens never scale to match the ship, so a better one only ever makes the game kinder.
Never by accident. The game starts in Add & Take Away and stays there until someone opens the door.
You can switch it on yourself before any game under Kind of Math → Times Tables Too. Or your child can earn it: save the five Season 1 worlds (Bloop Planet through the Cosmic Crown) and, if their age band is 7–8 or 9–12, multiplication unlocks for good — with a celebration, three new planets and three new ships. A five-year-old who saves the galaxy is offered a harder run instead; the prize should not be an operator they have not met at school.
Once it is on, times questions start with only the 2 and 10 tables and small second numbers, and widen as your child gets multiplication answers right. Both numbers stay at 10 or under.
Season 1 is five worlds — Bloop Planet, Aqua World, Lava Star, Frost Moon and the Cosmic Crown — each with a narrated comic-strip story, a handful of waves and a boss on the final one. Beating a world unlocks the next, scores up to three stars, and frees 3 friends (15 altogether) into the Friends Rescued book.
Season 2 continues the story past the Cosmic Crown — Echo Field, Mirror Tide and Cinder Echo so far. Breaking the Crown let something out that copies things, so each Season 2 boss is a shadow copy of a friend your child already rescued. The fifteen friends are all home by then, so these worlds add story and stars rather than more friends.
There is also one Daily Mission a day, the same for every player, worth 2,500 stars; and a Planet in Trouble — a world your child already saved needs saving again today, with one twist (extra aliens, extra Brain Boosts, or double stars) and a 3,000-star bonus.
When every world is done, the whole journey can be replayed at a harder tier. Nothing already earned is taken away.
That is a shield, and it is deliberate. Landing a long run of hits without a break makes the boss raise it for a couple of seconds, then it fades on its own. The threshold is lower on a phone than on a desktop, because a narrow screen keeps the boss in the firing line far more of the time.
It exists so the boss is a fight rather than a button-hold. A BOOM smashes straight through it, which is the lesson: save one for the moment he turtles. Nothing is lost by simply waiting either — the shield always drops.
No — it is doing that on purpose. The game measures its own frame rate while your child plays, and on a slower device it quietly steps down the graphics: fewer background details, softer glows, and a lower-resolution canvas.
A smooth game a child can aim in matters far more than a pretty one that stutters, and on the slowest devices this is the difference between playable and not. Nothing about the game itself changes — same waves, same maths, same rewards. If the device turns out to be faster than it first looked, the quality climbs back up on its own.
Short taps of vibration on hits, BOOMs and correct answers, on phones and tablets that support it. It is deliberately brief — a click rather than a buzz.
It follows the sound button: muting the game also stops the vibration, so one control silences everything. Desktop machines have no vibration and are unaffected.
The next ship your child has not earned yet, with a bar showing how far through that particular step they are — not how far from zero, so it always appears to move.
When the next ship is still several games away, a second line offers a nearer goal from the Math Galaxy instead. The two are different on purpose: the ship creeps up whether they play well or badly, while the planet only moves if they actually learn something. If they have never opened the Math Galaxy, that line introduces it and names a ship that stars alone can never buy.
Each row is one operation. The percentage is simply correct answers divided by answers given for that operation, across everything played on this device, with the number of attempts in brackets: 73% (48) means 48 attempts, 73% of them right. Tap a row to read back every individual answer — the question, what they picked, and how long they took.
Underneath, facts known by heart counts individual facts (3 + 4, 9 − 4) that reached the four-correct-recalls standard described above. It is not the number of questions answered, and not the number of planets.
It leans the questions toward one skill. Pick a planet from the list and roughly two questions in three will come from that family; the rest stay random so the adaptive difficulty and the revision queue keep working.
Your child sees no menu and no announcement — the questions simply start arriving their way. Set it back to Balanced whenever you like. One caution: choosing a skill well beyond where they are now makes the questions noticeably harder.
Almost nothing, and no account is needed. Signed out, the game runs entirely in this browser: stars, ships, planets, the fact-by-fact memory and the answer log all live on this device, and it installs as an app that keeps working with no connection.
Signed out, the game never contacts our server at all — not for scores, not for progress, not even an anonymous count of how often it is played. There is nothing to opt out of, because nothing is sent.
Your child’s name never leaves this device. Even with a parent account, the server names the profiles Pilot 1, Pilot 2 and so on; we never ask for the child’s name and never for a photo of them. (A photo taken with the camera is kept on this device only, in this browser, so the same pilot is there next time. It is never uploaded to us and never leaves the device — and you can delete it at any time by tapping the bin on the photo.)
Signing in is optional and sits behind the grown-up question you just answered. It stores your email, an age band and emoji per pilot, and their results, so progress follows your child across devices and you can see it.
The Account tab has a Delete My Child’s Data button at the bottom.
Signed out, it clears this device’s learning progress: the fact memory, the skill level, the mastered planets and the answer log. Signed in, it does that and permanently deletes your parent account, every pilot profile and all their results from our server. You are asked to confirm first, and it cannot be undone.
🤝 Battle Together and ⚔ Head to Head are two players on this device — one at each end of the screen.
🌍 Play a Friend needs your friend on their own screen at the same time, with the game open.
A run code works any time — it is a recording of a run, so nobody has to be waiting.