Long Haul mode: learn a language with your hands on the wheel

Everything in Word Exchange Plaza so far has asked for your attention. The marquee scrolls, the clock runs, you answer fast or you lose the word. That's the point of the reaction-time game, and it works. But it means the plaza only ever got the minutes you could give it with your eyes on the screen, and most days those minutes are few.

Long Haul mode is for the other hours. The ones on the highway. The ones at a desk with a phone propped in a holder while you answer email. It is built to be a passive experience rather than a play experience: the game comes to you, at a pace you set, and asks for nothing more than a word spoken out loud every so often.

What it feels like

You hear a word. A few seconds later you hear it again. And again, calmly, until you say what it means. The moment you do, a soft chime confirms it, and the screen (which you are not looking at) shows the word, its meaning and a note about it. Then nothing happens for a while.

How long a while is up to you. It can be ten seconds. It can be five minutes. On a four-hour drive with a two-minute gap you'd meet around a hundred words, each one repeated until it lands, and you'd never have touched the phone.

Before the next word arrives, the plaza tells you it's coming. A spoken "two minutes left", then "one minute left", then three short beeps and a rising tone, and the next word plays. You get the same countdown after a wrong answer, so a mistake never leaves the game waiting for a tap. It just shows you the right answer, waits out the gap, and moves on.

Two places it belongs

• The car. Mount the phone, connect to the car's speakers, and drive. The mode keeps the screen awake and keeps running if another app pops over the top. Long gaps between words mean it fades into the background the way a podcast does, except that a podcast never checks whether you were listening.
• The desk. Phone in a holder next to the monitor, or a browser tab on a second screen, with a gap long enough that it interrupts you less than a notification would. Say the word, keep working. Over a day that adds up to more practice than most people manage in a dedicated session.

In both cases the rule is the same: you are not meant to look. Everything you need is spoken. The screen is there for the odd glance at a red light, and for the notes on the Correct card if you want them.

Turning it on

Open the dashboard, go to Game settings and pick the Long haul tab. There's a switch and two dials.

• Cooldown between questions. The gap after each answer before the next word. The dial runs in seconds up to thirty, then minutes up to fifteen, then five-minute steps, then hours. Turn it to Off for no gap at all.
• Notice before next question. When the countdown starts talking to you. Set it to ten seconds and you'll hear "ten seconds left" then the beeps. Set it to two minutes and you'll hear a call at two minutes, one minute, then the beeps. Anything at three seconds or under skips the voice and just beeps.

Then start Level 1, 2 or 3 as usual with the microphone on. The mode applies to all three. A few settings we've found that work:

• Long drive: cooldown 2 minutes, notice 10 seconds. Enough space to think, enough warning to tune back in.
• Desk, deep work: cooldown 5 to 10 minutes, notice 30 seconds. One word every coffee-sip.
• Commute, actually paying attention: cooldown 15 seconds, notice 5 seconds. Brisk, but never a scramble.

What changes under the hood

A few of the normal rules bend to fit the setting. The answer timer, which usually expires a word in a handful of seconds, is doubled so there's time to hear the prompt twice before it counts against you. Leaving the window no longer pauses the game, because on a mounted phone the window is "left" constantly. And the wrong-answer screen, which normally waits for you to dismiss it, now counts itself down like everything else.

Your progress is scored exactly as it always was. A correct answer in Long Haul is a correct answer, with the same reaction time, the same streaks and the same path to extinction. It's the same game. It just stopped tapping its foot.

A note on the road

Set the dials before you set off, put the phone somewhere you can't reach it, and never touch it while moving. The whole design goal was that you shouldn't need to, and if you ever find yourself wanting to, tell us what pulled your hand toward the screen. That's a bug, and we'd like to fix it.

What we'd like from you

This is the first version. The voice that reads the countdown, the length of the gap between repeats, the sounds themselves, all of it is up for debate. If the beeps are too sharp in a quiet car, if the repeat comes too soon, if you'd like the options read aloud as well as the word, tell us. Long drives are long. We'd like the plaza to be good company on them.