About

The game

There is one button, The Button, for everyone in the world. Each press resets The Countdown to 120 seconds. If it ever reaches zero, the game ends and one player becomes its winner. It hasn't happened.

You can press once a day, free. Nothing you can buy changes The Countdown or who wins.

The Countdown

• The Countdown is fixed and visible. There is no hidden state and nothing random.
• The server decides, to the millisecond. A press counts if it reaches the server before zero. A press that arrives exactly at zero is too late.
• Your tap takes time to travel. The Countdown on your screen already subtracts the time your connection needs, so it shows how long a press sent now has to arrive.
• The Countdown is 120 seconds and stays 120 seconds. It never gets shorter.
• Outages freeze The Countdown. If the game server or its database can't be reached for more than 5 seconds, an outage is declared automatically and The Countdown counts as frozen from the last moment it was reachable. When the game is back, The Countdown resumes where it stopped. Planned maintenance is announced at least 24 hours ahead. Every outage is listed on the status page.

Presses

• One free press per account per day. The day resets at 00:00 UTC.
• There are no paid presses, and there never will be.
• Every press is in the public log with the time left when it arrived. That time is a fact, not a score: it is never ranked and never earns a badge.
• You can add a line of up to 80 characters to your press. Your press counts the moment you tap; you then have 60 seconds to add the line, once, and it can't be changed afterwards. It is shown in the feed with your name. No links. Lines pass a filter, anyone can report one, and moderators can remove it. A removed line shows as "[removed]"; the press still counts.
• You can react to any press, with or without a line, with one of six emoji: ❤️ 😂 👏 🌙 🔥 🙏 (one per press, changeable; counts only; free). Reactions stay on the press if its line is removed.
• A press in the feed can carry marks: your streak from 3 days, your first press, "Back" after a broken streak, your own hour, the first press from your country, a round press number, a year since your first press, your Pioneer number. They are facts about the day and your history, never about the time left, and nothing ranks them.

Your account

• Sign in with Google, Facebook or a link sent to your email address. One account per person.
• You get a random name. You can change it once a month.
• Your profile shows your streak (days in a row you pressed), your presses, your country, your hour and the day you joined.
• Sign up before the first press and you are a Pioneer: a numbered badge on your profile, yours for good. It changes nothing in the game.
• Everyone who signs up gets one hour of the day to keep watch: the hour you try to press in. We give you an hour where few people are yet; change it whenever you like. You can still press at any other time.
• Every hour has a name, Alpha for 00:00 UTC to Omega for 23:00. Your hour's name stands next to your name in the feed and on the lists, unless you turn it off.
• There are no ranks: pressing when few others are around earns nothing extra, and neither does pressing late.

Countries

• Everyone presses for a country. It is set from your connection when you sign up, and you can change it once to any country.
• Your flag shows in the feed only if you turn it on.
• Each hour of the day is held by the country that pressed most in that hour over the last 7 days. The line of 24 boxes below The Countdown shows who holds which hour.
• Countries have no effect on The Countdown or the winner.

The winner

• There is no money to win. If The Countdown reaches zero, the player with the longest streak among everyone who pressed in the 24 hours before the last press becomes the Winner of Season 1. If two streaks are equal, the player who joined first.
• One missed day doesn't break your streak: the shield. It comes back after 30 pressed days in a row.
• Beside every streak, a shield symbol shows how often the shield was used in it.
• A day that lies entirely inside declared outages counts neither as pressed nor as missed.
• The Winner page shows live who would win if the game ended now.
• Accounts flagged as bots, or deleted, when the game ends can't win; the next in line is. The operator never is.
• The winner receives three things, none of them worth money:
  • The title "Winner of Season 1", beside their name on the memorial, the Winner page, the hall of fame and their profile. There is only one.
  • The last word: one line of up to 280 characters, written within 30 days of the end. It stays on the memorial, under the frozen countdown, for good. The same rules as press lines: no links, and it can be removed if it breaks them. If the winner writes nothing, there is none.
  • A printed certificate, sent by post. We email the winner to ask where to send it; the address is used only for that and deleted afterwards.
• If the winner doesn't answer, the title is still theirs. Nothing passes to anyone else.
• Players anywhere in the world can play and win.
• Nothing you can buy changes who wins.

Alerts

You can ask for a push notification when The Countdown runs low, for the hours you choose. They are free and the same offer for everyone: you choose when, under 15, 30 or 60 seconds (30 unless you change it), at most 3 a day and at most one per round. Your choice is private: only you see it. Alerts go only to players who haven't pressed yet that day. Nothing you can buy changes them.

What's sold, and what isn't

Nothing is sold yet. When the shop opens, it sells:

• Guardian, USD 3 a month, cancellable any month: a Guardian mark next to your name that counts the months you've paid for ("Guardian · 14 months"), your hour's name in gold, your name on the Wall of people keeping Unpressed running (you can turn that off), and one free gift a month to give. It doesn't change alerts.
• Gifts, USD 2 each, on another player's press, with or without a line. A gifted press stands out in the feed with a 🎁 and its count. With your name or anonymous, without a message. Not on your own press. The receiver's profile shows how often they were gifted. "Just gifted", above the feed, shows the press gifted last until the next gift; it never shows the time left at that press.
• Gifts bought ahead: 1 to 10 at once, USD 2 each, no discount. "Gift" uses them after a Guardian's free gift of the month, before asking you to pay. They don't expire while the game runs; unused ones are refunded when the game ends or you delete your account.
• Day stamps, USD 3: "I was there", on your profile, for a day you pressed on: day 1, day 66 (the day Unpressed outlived Reddit's The Button), day 100 and day 365. One per day; every player who pressed that day can have one.
• You can't spend more than USD 50 a month on Unpressed, ever.
• The money pays for running the game. None of it goes to players.

What you buy always looks different from what you earn: the Pioneer number, your streak and your hour are never sold. Nothing you buy changes The Countdown, your streak, the shield, alerts or who wins, and nothing is ranked by gifts or money.

Never sold: presses, streaks, shields, hours, alerts, places on any list, or anything that affects who wins.

Bots

Sign-in is verified and every account has one press a day, so a bot is one more press a day, nothing more. Each press also passes an invisible human check in your browser (Cloudflare Turnstile); it never delays or blocks a press. Accounts that press like a machine, or whose presses repeatedly come without a passed human check, get an asterisk, can't win while marked, and can appeal. Nobody is banned automatically.

Moderation

Moderation is done by an AI, the Unpressed Moderator, under these rules: it removes lines and resets names that break them, reviews flagged accounts and decides appeals, each decision with its reason in the audit log. An appeal is decided by a different run than the one that made the first decision. You have the right to have a human look at any decision about your account: write to [email protected]. The moderator never presses, can't change The Countdown and never sees your email address. What it did, week by week, is on the moderation page.

The end

If The Countdown reaches zero, the site becomes a memorial: the full log, the last hour of presses, the countries' history, the last press, the winner and, once written, their last word. Sales stop: subscriptions are cancelled (the running month is not refunded) and a payment made after the end is refunded. Season 2 starts 30 days later.

The operator

The operator never presses: the owner's account is refused by the database and can't win. The operator can't change The Countdown. Every press is public and the full log can be downloaded.

The Countdown

Each press starts The Countdown again from 120 seconds.

• A press counts if it reaches our server before The Countdown reaches zero. The server's arrival time decides, to the millisecond; a press that arrives exactly at zero is too late.
• The time left when a press arrived is stored with it: the length of the round (120 seconds) minus the time since the press before.
• The Countdown on your screen shows how long a press sent now has: the time left minus the time your connection needs to reach us, measured continuously. Above 10 seconds it shows whole seconds, rounded; below 10 seconds it shows tenths, rounded down, so it shows 0.0 only at zero.

Check it yourself: in the log, each press's timer_remaining_ms is its round's window_ms minus the time since the press before it (pressed_at), outages aside (below).

Outages

A server failure can't end the game.

• If no game server was serving for more than 5 seconds, the gap is declared an outage automatically. The Countdown counts as frozen from the last moment a server was serving (or the last press, if that came later) until the game is back, and then resumes with the time it had.
• A gap of 5 seconds or less is not an outage: The Countdown kept running.
• Planned maintenance is declared by the operator in advance and freezes The Countdown the same way.

Check it yourself: the log's outage file lists every outage with started_at, ended_at, declared_by and the frozen_remaining_ms it resumed with.

The length of The Countdown

The Countdown is 120 seconds and stays 120 seconds. It never gets shorter, and nobody can change it.

Check it yourself: each press's window_ms in the log is the window of the round it started.

One press a day

Every account can press one time per day, free.

• The day is the UTC day: it resets at 00:00 UTC.
• A line with a press is at most 80 characters, and is added within 60 seconds of the press's arrival at the server.

Streaks and the shield

Your streak is the number of UTC days in a row you pressed.

• A missed day breaks the streak, unless your shield is available: then the shield is used, the streak survives, and the missed day doesn't count as a day.
• Every account starts with the shield. Once used, it comes back after 30 pressed days in a row.
• Today counts once you've pressed; until the day is over, not having pressed yet is not a miss.
• Shield uses: the number of missed days the shield bridged in a streak, shown beside it with a shield symbol. For the current streak, the missed days since it began; for the longest, those within the streak that set it (the first to reach that length); on a profile also all uses ever. A bridged day counts for a streak once a press follows it.
• A UTC day that lies entirely inside declared outages counts neither as pressed nor as missed.

Check it yourself: every press in the log carries its player's pseudonym (player), so anyone can list a player's pressed days and run this rule over them.

The winner

If The Countdown reaches zero, one player becomes the Winner of Season 1. There is no money to win.

• The final press is the last press before The Countdown reached zero. Everyone who pressed in the 24 hours up to and including the final press is a candidate.
• Among the candidates, the longest streak, as of the day of the final press, is the winner. On equal streaks, the account created first; if two were created in the same instant, a fixed order by account.
• Not eligible: accounts flagged as bots or deleted at the moment of the final press, and the operator's account. The next in line takes their place.
• The winner may write the last word: up to 280 characters, once, within 30 days of the end, under the rules for press lines. If the operator removes it for breaking those rules, the winner may write it again within the same days. If nothing is written within that time, there is none.

Check it yourself: the log gives the final press and everyone who pressed in the 24 hours before it, and their pressed days. The join date of each player is on their public profile.

Hours and countries

Each hour of the day belongs to the country that pressed most in it.

• Every press counts for the country the player had when pressing.
• Each hour's strongest country, last 7 days: for each UTC hour (00:00–00:59 and so on), the presses in that hour over the last 7 days, summed per country. The country with the most holds the hour. Recomputed every hour.
• Contested: the second country is within 10% of the first. On an exact tie the hour goes to the country whose code comes first alphabetically, and it is contested.
• Last 24 hours: each of the last 24 clock hours on its own, held by the country with the most presses in that one hour.
• Since start: the same as the 7-day view, over every press since the first.
• The colour of an hour shows how many pressed in it, compared with the busiest hour. Tapping an hour shows its first 5 countries.

The countries board

• Players: accounts of a country that have pressed at least once and aren't deleted.
• Presses: every press counted for the country.
• Longest streak: the longest current streak among the country's players.
• Hours held: how many of the 24 hours the country holds in the 7-day view.
• Per capita: presses per million inhabitants. Population: World Bank, SP.POP.TOTL, 2024 (api.worldbank.org, data last updated 2026-07-13), retrieved 2026-09-29, licensed CC BY 4.0; Taiwan: Ministry of the Interior (Taiwan), household registration, end of 2024 (ris.gov.tw/app/en/3910), retrieved 2026-09-29.
• Countries with fewer than 10 players are listed below the others, unranked.

Check it yourself: https://core.unpressed.app/api/countries and https://core.unpressed.app/api/hours-held. The log shows a press's country only for players who chose to show their flag, so the country figures can be checked from the log only for those.

Stats

• Presses today: every press since 00:00 UTC.
• People in the last hour: how many different players pressed in the last 60 minutes.
• Safety margin: for each UTC hour of the day, the median time left at a press in that hour over the last 7 days. Only the median is shown: never the lowest time left, a record or a name.
• Hours that need you: the 3 hours of the day with the fewest presses over the last 7 days.
• Charts: presses and new players per UTC day since day 1 (by week after 400 days), and presses per clock hour over the last 7 days.
• Streaks: how many players currently have a streak of at least 7, 30, 100 or 365 days.

Check it yourself: https://core.unpressed.app/api/stats. It is recomputed every few minutes.

Pioneers and your hour

Neither touches The Countdown or who wins.

• Pioneer number: every account created before the first press gets the next number: 1, 2, 3 and so on. Once the first press is in, no more numbers are given. A number is never given twice; a deleted account keeps its own.
• Your hour: the UTC hour of the day you keep watch. At sign-up it is chosen for you: among the hours that start between 08:00 and 20:59 on your device's clock, the one with the fewest players keeping watch; if several have as few, the one starting nearest 18:00 your time, then the earlier one. If you came through a link that names an hour, that hour. You can change it any time on your profile. It is the hour you try to press in, not a rule: you can press at any other time.
• Hour names: each UTC hour has a name, the Greek alphabet in order: Alpha (00:00–00:59), Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi and Omega (23:00–23:59). The name of your hour stands next to your name in the feed, on the lists and on your profile, unless you turn that off; it is your hour as it is now, on your earlier presses too. It says nothing about the time left at any press, and it is not in the downloadable log.
• Who keeps watch at what time: for each UTC hour, how many players keep watch then, not counting deleted accounts. An hour is shown full at 260 people. Tapping an hour shows its countries; countries are counted for every player, as on the countries board, whether or not they show their flag.

Check it yourself: https://core.unpressed.app/api/founders, updated every minute.

Bots

A bot is one more press a day, nothing more: sign-in is verified and every account has one press a day.

• Accounts that press like a machine are marked with an asterisk. They can appeal, and nobody is banned automatically.
• Each press carries an invisible human check (Cloudflare Turnstile), asked after the press has counted. An account whose presses repeatedly come without a passed check is marked the same way. If Cloudflare can't be reached, that press isn't held against anyone.
• A marked account can't win while marked.
• How a machine is recognised is not published, so it can't be imitated.

Check it yourself: the log's flagged column.

Where this comes from

On 1 April 2015 Reddit put a button on r/thebutton with a 60-second countdown. Each press reset it, and each Reddit account could press once, ever. More than a million people pressed. On 5 June 2015, after 65 days, the countdown reached zero.

Unpressed is a new attempt at the same idea, and owes it to The Button and the people who kept it alive.

What we learned from it

We read the complete log of The Button, all 1,008,315 presses. The Button didn't run out of players: in its last day people still pressed about 120 times an hour, against a 60-second timer. It ended because pressing late became the prize. Its colours showed how low the timer was when you pressed, and the lowest colours were the rarest. In the last weeks the crowd stopped keeping the timer up and started waiting to press as late as possible. By the end it was no safer than if nobody had been watching.

What is different here

• You press once a day, not once ever. The players don't run out.
• Pressing late earns nothing. The time left at a press is recorded, never ranked, and there is no rank for pressing when few others are around either. What lasts is a streak of days, and an hour of the day you keep.
• Countries hold hours. Every hour of the day is held by the country that covers it most, so the night has defenders.
• Outages freeze The Countdown. A server failure can't end the game.
• There is a winner, the longest streak among those who pressed in the last day, not whoever pressed last. The winner gets a title and the last word, not money.
• We never press, and we can't touch The Countdown. Every press is public.