How to Play
Carry the One is a mental arithmetic game played against a shrinking clock. Every question gives you four answers and only one is right. There is no typing and no working out on paper — you either see it or you don’t.
The three difficulties
| Mode | What you get | Starting clock |
|---|---|---|
| Kiddo | Addition and subtraction to begin with, multiplication once you reach level three. Numbers stay small. | 9.0 seconds |
| Difficult | All four operations, two and three digit numbers, division that always comes out whole. | 7.0 seconds |
| Oh Wow Expert | Chained sums, squares, percentages, brackets and large multiplications. | 5.5 seconds |
Solo runs
You start with two lives and one level. Every five correct answers in a row moves you up a level, and each level takes a little more time off the clock. A wrong answer or a timeout costs a life. Lose both and the run ends.
Your best score for each difficulty is kept separately, so a good Kiddo run never overwrites a good Expert one.
Playing against other people
A room holds up to four players. Whoever creates it picks the difficulty and how many questions the round runs for — ten, fifteen, twenty or twenty-five — and shares the four-character room code.
Rooms work differently from solo runs. Everyone sees the same question at the same time, and the first answer to reach the server settles it for the whole room:
- Answer correctly first and you take the point.
- Answer wrongly first and you lose a point, while everyone else gains one.
- If nobody answers before the clock runs out, everyone loses a point.
There are no lives in a room. The round runs for its full question count and the highest score wins, which means a bad start is always recoverable — and buzzing in on a guess is genuinely risky.
Keyboard
On a computer, press 1, 2, 3 or 4 to pick an answer instead of clicking.
Installing it
Carry the One can be installed to your home screen from the Install App option on the main menu. It then opens full screen like an ordinary app, and solo runs keep working with no connection. Rooms and leaderboards need to be online.