Major System Blaster Game

Saucers drift down on a city, each carrying a word. Turn the word into its Major System number and type it to fire the city's rocket launcher. ROCKET is R, CK and T, so 471. Speed comes from hearing the consonant sounds without spelling them out. A second mode flips it around: the saucer carries a number, and you pick the word that encodes it.

Saucers carry words like ROCKET. Hear the consonant sounds, type the Major System number, 471, and shoot the saucer down before it lands.

How to play

Choose what the saucers carry. In WORDS, each saucer carries a word and you type its number. In NUMBERS, each saucer carries a number and you pick its word from four.
Say the word to yourself and turn each consonant sound into its digit: S and Z are 0, T and D are 1, N is 2, M is 3, R is 4, L is 5, SH, J and soft CH and G are 6, K, Q and hard C and G are 7, F and V are 8, and P and B are 9.
Only sounds count. Vowels and W, H and Y count for nothing, a double letter is one sound, and a silent letter is not a sound, so KNIFE is 28 and BUTTON is 912.
The lowest saucer is the target, with a ring round it. Tap another saucer to aim at it instead, or press the left and right arrow keys.
Type the number and press FIRE. A wrong number jams the whole launcher for a moment, and the saucer drops a little and speeds up. In NUMBERS mode, a wrong word does the same.
A saucer that reaches the city takes one of your three shields. When the last one falls, the game is over, and you see every word you missed with its number.

Wave 1 sends 5 saucers, and each wave after it sends one more, up to 12. The first wave has plain one- and two-digit words. Wave 2 adds silent letters, soft C and G, and PH, wave 3 adds three-digit words, and wave 4 adds four-digit words. In wave 1 a saucer takes 15 seconds to reach the city with a two-digit word, and 2.5 seconds more or less for each digit more or less. Each wave is 6% faster than the last. Words you miss come back in a later wave.

On a keyboard, type the digits, press Enter to fire, Backspace to delete one digit and Delete to clear them all. In NUMBERS mode, press 1 to 4 for the words. Escape or Space pauses.

Scoring

A saucer shot down with no wrong answer scores 50 points for each digit of its number, plus up to 50 more for each digit for how high it still is.
A saucer shot down after a wrong answer scores 10 for each digit.
A wave with no wrong answer and no landing adds 250.

Your five best scores are saved in this browser for each mode, with the wave each game reached. In practice, each key shows its sounds, a wrong answer shows the right one with its sounding letters picked out, and a saucer that lands costs no shield, so the game goes on until you end it from the pause screen. Practice games are not saved.

Why practice the Major System this way

The Major System turns numbers into words, so that a long number becomes a short story you can place in a memory palace. It only pays off once the step from sounds to digits is automatic. Major System Blaster drills that step in both directions, with words picked so that each number is clear in any accent: no TH, NG or X, and no R unless a vowel follows it, since many accents drop the rest.

To learn the system itself, read How to Memorize Numbers with the Major System and the History of the Major System. When you have your own list of words for 00 to 99, train with the number system practice tool and use them as peg lists.

Try our other free memory games, such as Binary Barrage for reading binary or Pi Runner for the digits of pi.