Relay is played from just behind a sprinter carrying a baton down a 3D track, and your finger does exactly one thing: it slaps the baton across to whoever is running alongside. What makes it a game rather than a beat test is that there is no fixed beat. Each team-mate comes into the painted exchange zone at their own closing speed, and a floating bar above them shrinks toward a notch and flares green only while that speed difference is small enough for the baton to actually transfer. You are matching a moving quantity you do not control, and the longer you wait for the better handoff, the less track is left to make it in.
Tap anywhere on the canvas to pass. Two runners share every zone and they are not equal. The cyan flyer arrives first, badged x3, but its window is a blink wide and it is already pulling away from you. The amber x1 runner comes later with a window you can almost stroll into. So each zone is a small bet rather than a reflex: gamble on the flyer, or let it go and bank the safe exchange. The rail on the right repeats the current match as a bar, which is faster to read than the scene once the track is busy. A clean pass raises the multiplier, and it climbs to four times normal, so a sprinter who keeps hitting flyers scores several times what a tapper does over the same run. Let a whole zone go by without passing and the baton hits the ground, and slapping it out between zones when nobody is within reach throws it away too — five lost legs and the race is over, so spraying taps is not a strategy.
At twenty-five points a third runner joins the back of every zone. The pink burner is worth x5 and its window is narrower than the flyer's, and because it arrives last you can only take it by passing up both of the safer handoffs first. The whole shape of the decision changes: in the first act waiting was the cautious option, and now waiting is the greedy one, with a dropped baton waiting at the end of the zone if the burner's window closes on you. Worse, the amber runner starts missing zones altogether — the header reads no safe handoff when that happens — so the forgiving window you have been leaning on is simply not there, and the two narrow ones are the only way to keep the baton moving. Chill, Normal and Hard stretch or squeeze every window and the gaps between zones, but the opening stretch stays runnable in all three so you learn the exchange before it starts charging you for it.