Zap-N Reaction & Memory Mini-Games

A battery of fast reaction / working-memory mini-games inside the OA. Reportedly up to nine games, though many candidates only see three. Each game accelerates as you progress; raw reaction speed and pattern recognition matter more than reasoning. Requirements A set of timed mini-games (advertised as up to 9 stages; QR/PhD sittings frequently see only 3). Each game has a short practice round before it counts. The recurring games: Skyscraper / stacking — rebuild a target stack of coloured blocks in the fewest moves (a water-pouring / Towers-of-Hanoi flavored puzzle); speed and move-count both matter. Tip: fix the bottom floor first, then work upward. Code Compare — pick which of ~4 candidate strings (7–10 chars of digits+letters, like a licence plate) exactly matches the prompt. The clock shrinks each round; confusing options differ by only 1–2 characters. The Switch / left-right — alternating prompts (arithmetic vs. shape comparison; arrow direction vs. odd-number checks) testing task-switching. Difficulty ramps continuously — later rounds give roughly one second per decision. Notes For Code Compare, several candidates find scanning from the suffix faster: the test deliberately makes prefixes collide across options, so unique distinguishing characters tend to sit at the end. A real mouse beats a trackpad here — multiple candidates blamed a trackpad for running out of time on the speed games. These games are partly a hard-to-game reflex screen; some candidates report not being auto-rejected for a weak game section if other parts were strong. Preparation Warm up on reaction / working-memory trainers (Lumosity / Brain Wars style) and on any free Optiver/TraderMath Zap-N practice before the real attempt. Use the in-game practice round to learn each game's exact rule set so the scored run is pure execution. Have a wired/quality mouse plugged in and a distraction-free setup.