How to play
Number Target is the numbers round from TV quiz shows, the kind that has been a staple in Turkey and elsewhere for decades. Each round deals six number tiles and a three-digit target. Your job is to land on the target, or as close to it as you can, before the clock runs out.
The tiles are always five small numbers from 1 to 9 (repeats are possible, so you might get two 7s) and one large number: 25, 50, 75 or 100. The target is anything from 101 to 999.
- Tap a tile, then an operation, then a second tile. The two tiles disappear and their result appears as a new tile you can use in later steps. The prompt line above the tiles tells you what to tap next.
- Every tile is used at most once. Leaving some unused is fine.
- Stay with positive whole numbers. Subtraction has to give a result above zero (take the smaller from the larger), and division must come out exactly. The game tells you if a step isn’t allowed and leaves your tiles alone.
- Give your answer. Select any tile and tap Answer (the button shows the selected number), or tap Answer closest to hand in whichever tile is nearest. Making the target exactly answers for you at once.
Undo reverses your last step, and Start over puts the original six tiles back. The Timer button switches the 90-second clock on or off; the bar shrinks as time passes and changes colour in the last ten seconds. If time runs out, your closest tile is submitted automatically. New game starts five fresh rounds.
Scoring
| Distance from target | Points |
|---|---|
| Exact | 10 |
| 1 to 5 away | 7 |
| 6 to 10 away | 5 |
| More than 10 away | 0 |
Five rounds make a game, so 50 is a perfect score. Your steps are listed under the tiles as you go, and after each round the game shows a solver’s answer: either one way to hit the target exactly, or the closest number that could possibly be made from those six tiles. The score and round counter sit in the top bar.
Exact solutions are common. In a check we ran on 400 random rounds, about 96% could be hit exactly and nearly all of the rest could be reached within 5. So if you’re stuck at 7 or 8 away, there’s usually something better.
Strategy
The fastest players work backwards from the target and forwards from the big tile at the same time.
Find the right multiple first. Divide the target by the large number in your head. With 100 and a target of 740, you want 7 hundreds. With 75 and a target of 452, six 75s is 450, so you need 6 and then 2 more. Make that multiplier from the small tiles if it isn’t there already: 3 × 2 = 6, or 9 − 2 = 7.
Then build the gap separately. For 740 with 100 × 7 = 700 done, you need 40. Something like 5 × 9 − 3 − 2 = 40 finishes it. Keeping the “main” product and the “gap” as two separate tiles makes it easy to see what’s left.
Try the target’s neighbours. If 740 won’t come, look at 739 or 741 as products plus or minus a small tile. Missing by one still scores 7.
Small multipliers on small tiles. When the large number is 25 or 50, the target is often closer to a product of two small numbers times the large one: 50 × (4 + 3) = 350, then adjust.
Hold a 1 or 2 in reserve. It’s tempting to use every small tile early. A spare 1 or 2 at the end is what turns 7 points into 10.
Use the solver. The answer shown after each round is the best way to improve. Look for the pattern: was it a multiple of the big tile, a product of two small ones, or a division you didn’t consider?
If you like quick mental arithmetic with a different shape, Math Cages builds a whole grid around sums and products, and 2048 is about doubling.
