The rules of the game.

Duels

A duel is one on one, on your own time. You both start with 100 HP and get 8 attacks each.

1. Pick your words. Paste a list, grab a ready-made one, or use one you've saved.
2. Land the opening strike. Choose an attack, then answer a question to charge it.
3. Send the link. Your friend opens it, accepts the duel, and blocks with the same skill.
4. Trade blows. After blocking, your friend counterattacks and sends the link back.

The duel ends when someone reaches 0 HP, or when you've both attacked 8 times. Then most HP wins.

Each player gets the words they're weakest on, so a strong player and a beginner can have a fair match. No friend around? Rookie, Scholar and Grandmaster play a full duel against you by the same rules.

Attacks

A perfect answer charges full power, a close one 70%, and a miss fizzles. You get 20 seconds for a meaning, 40 for pinyin, and 20 plus 25 for each character you write.

Pinyin is forgiving about tones. With the letters right, each tone you get wrong costs 20% of the power, never dropping below half. Spelling it with no tones at all earns half. The spoken third-tone change counts as right, so níhǎo is fine for 你好 nǐhǎo. Type tones as numbers or marks, and v works for ü.

Blocking

When an attack comes in, you defend with the same skill.

If an attack fizzles there's nothing to block, and the turn simply passes.

Wild Strike

🎲 A Wild Strike rolls the dice before the question appears: a random attack at a random difficulty, for +35% power. The difficulty changes the question itself, and your rival has to block at the same difficulty.

Boosts and help

• ⚡ Riposte: a perfect block earns +20% on your counterattack.
• 🔥 Focus: get 4 of 5 training questions right while you wait, and your next attack hits 25% harder.

In a duel, help costs you. It cuts the power of an attack and pulls a block toward a full hit, and the battle log shows when someone used it.

Costs add up, to at most −75%. In training, help is free, but a helped answer only counts as close toward how well you know the word.

How writing is graded

The point is knowing the character, so the pad is kind:

• Each stroke you draw counts as the closest stroke still to be written, in any order and either direction.
• A bent stroke can be drawn as two lines, and going over a stroke again costs nothing.
• A shaky hand is fine, and so is a character that comes out small or off to one side.
• A slip every four strokes or so is still perfect.
• After 3 misses in a row the next stroke is drawn for you. It's still close if you wrote at least half the strokes yourself.

If your order wasn't the usual one, the result says so at no cost, and ✍️ shows the usual order. Writing is matched against stroke data, so look-alikes such as 未 and 末 can pass.

Word lists

• Paste your own. One word per line, in almost any format: 参加 - to take part in, 希望, to hope, a Quizlet export, or just 运动. Pinyin and missing meanings come from the dictionary, and your own meaning always wins.
• Use a ready-made list. HSK 1–6, as a whole level or in parts, and the most common characters in parts up to 1,000.
• Pick characters yourself from the 3,000 most common, or add words from the dictionary with one tap.

When you accept a challenge you can use the challenger's list or one of your own. Each player is quizzed on their own words, and rematches keep both lists.

Character Sprint 眼疾手快

60 seconds to tell look-alike characters apart. Hear a word and read its meaning, then tap its characters in order on a board of 6–12 tiles. The wrong tiles are look-alikes (已 / 己, 未 / 末, 晴 / 睛) and same-sound characters.

• Scoring: 100 points per character, +25% per level, times your streak of clean words: ×1.5 from 3 in a row, ×2 from 6, ×2.5 from 10 and ×3 from 15.
• A wrong tap costs 2 seconds, halves that word and breaks your streak. The game tells you what you tapped, and the word comes back once, three words later.
• 5 levels, the same for everyone. Boards grow and the look-alikes get closer.
• Prompts: sound and meaning (the meaning disappears from level 4), sound only, or meaning only, which is silent, for class or the bus.
• Race a friend: send the link and everyone who opens it plays the exact same boards.

Character Climb 步步高升

Sprint's look-alike boards as a climb for a whole group, played on your own time.

• 20 steps to the top. Every word you find is a step up, with a new level every four steps, so the top is the hardest.
• 3 hearts. Each wrong tap costs one. Tapping the word's own characters out of order doesn't. Lose them all and you fall where you are.
• Highest wins. At the same height, the fastest wins. The clock only counts time on the boards.
• Ghosts. Whoever climbed before you climbs alongside, replaying their real climb step by step.
• The podium. The results are final once everyone has climbed, a day has passed, or whoever started it ends it.

Studying

Every list has its own page, and everything on it feeds how well the game thinks you know each word.

• An overview of all its words. Hide the pinyin or meanings to quiz yourself, and tap a word for its stroke order.
• Flashcards, weakest words first, with a stroke-order animation for each character.
• Practice. Choose the skill, the length and the writing difficulty, then re-practice just the words you didn't get perfect.
• The stroke helper. ✍️ draws any word one stroke at a time, with a start dot and an arrow showing the direction.
• The dictionary. More than 120,000 entries. Search as you type in pinyin, English or characters, and add a word to a list with one tap.