Goalkeeper Reflex

Read the shot and dive at the last instant. Waiting tells you more about where the ball is going — and costs you the ground you no longer have time to cover. Four modes, a shooter that learns your habits, and a daily set of twenty that is the same for everyone.

Mode

Ten penalties. Read each one and commit when you are ready.

No Penalty Saves session recorded yet.

Penalty Saves — press Start when you are ready.

How to play

Press Start. The shooter lines up, strikes, and the ball is in the air for a little under half a second. Tap one of the nine squares to send the keeper there — they are laid out like the goal, so the top left square dives to the top left.

On a keyboard the number pad does the same: 7 8 9 high, 4 5 6 across the middle, 1 2 3 low. Enter moves on to the next shot.

Staying in the middle is a real choice. So is doing nothing — a keeper who never moves saves anything hit straight at them.

Two rules worth knowing before you start

A shot off the post is not a save. It is recorded as woodwork — not a goal, not counted against you, but not a save either, because the frame stopped it rather than you. Roughly one shot in twenty clips the frame, and the summary lists them separately so the number is never a mystery.

You cannot change your mind. Once you commit, the keeper travels to that corner at 4.5 metres a second and keeps going. That is the whole game: another moment of waiting tells you more, and costs you ground.

Modes

Penalty Saves: — ten penalties, with the longest window to commit
Rapid Fire: — ten shots, and the window to commit closes about half as late
Career Ladder: — five rounds, each with a better striker than the last; concede five and it is over
Daily 20 Shots: — twenty shots, the same for everybody, every UTC day

Each keeps its own best. Rapid Fire and Penalty Saves are not comparable — the window to commit is different — so one number across both would tell you that you had got worse when you had only changed mode.

Tips

Watch the ball, not the striker. Everything you need is in the first two hundred milliseconds of the flight.
A curled shot bends more the longer it is in the air, so a ball that looks on target early can finish outside the post. Reading one too early is worse than reading it a fraction late.
Vary where you go. The shooter watches what you have already done and starts aiming away from your habits.
The middle is under-rated against a wayward striker, and the worse the striker, the more often the ball goes near it.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your bests, your career ladder, your daily history and your settings are kept in this browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere — there is no account, no server and no leaderboard. The shots are generated on your own device and the sounds are synthesised there too; nothing is downloaded. Clearing this game's data removes all of it and touches nothing else on Zerdly.

Frequently asked questions

I dived the right way and it hit the post. Why is that not a save?: Because the post stopped it, not you. It is recorded as woodwork: not a goal, and not counted against you either — but not a save. About one shot in twenty clips the frame, so if those counted as saves every save percentage on the site would be inflated by roughly that much and the number would stop meaning “shots you stopped”. The summary lists woodwork separately so you can always see how many there were.
When should I commit?: A shot is in the air for a little under half a second. Committing the instant it is struck is a pure guess and saves roughly a quarter of what comes at you. Waiting until about halfway through the flight roughly doubles that, because by then the ball has told you where it is going. Leave it much past four-fifths of the flight and it falls away again — the keeper travels at 4.5 metres a second and simply cannot get there. There is no single right answer, which is the point of the game.
Can I change my mind after committing?: No, and that is the rule the whole game rests on. Once you commit, the keeper travels to that corner at a fixed speed and keeps going. Waiting buys you information; committing spends the ground you have left to cover. If you could change your mind, waiting would be free and there would be no decision to make.
Why are the top corners so hard?: Because they are further away. The keeper's hands travel in a straight line at one speed from the middle of the goal, so a top corner takes longer to reach than a low central shot — a goal is 7.32 metres wide and 2.44 tall, and the keeper's span is 1.9 metres. Nothing in the rules singles out the corners; it falls out of the distance.
Is the shooter cheating? It seems to know where I am going.: It does not know, and it cannot: the shot is fully decided before you are able to commit, and nothing recalculates it afterwards. What it does is look at the shots already finished. Dive the same way several times and it starts going the other way; it also avoids firing at the same corner over and over, because that is the most obvious tell an offline opponent has. Both use only attempts that are already over. In the Daily it does neither, so everybody gets the same twenty shots.
Does staying in the middle ever work?: Yes. A keeper who stays put saves anything struck straight at them, and a shooter aiming for the corners will miss the target sometimes. Committing to the centre and not committing at all do the same thing.
Does the game run the same on a slow phone?: Yes, and that took some care. The ball is drawn in fixed steps so its motion looks the same on any screen, but the result does not come from those steps — the moment the ball crosses the line is solved exactly. Deciding it from whichever animation frame happened to land nearest would get about one goal-or-no-goal call in twenty-eight wrong, because in a single frame at 60Hz a penalty travels far enough to move the ball most of its own width past where it really crossed. The penalty spot is 11 metres out and a struck ball covers that in about four tenths of a second.
Why is there no leaderboard?: There is no server and no account, so there is nobody to compare you with. Your bests, your career ladder and your daily history live in this browser and nowhere else.