Crowd Count: how to grow your crowd and take every gate

How the gates actually work

Every pair of gates in Crowd Count changes your crowd count by a different rule: a plus gate and a times gate both grow it, while a minus gate and a divide gate both shrink it. Your job at each pair is simple to state and easy to get wrong in the moment — work out which of the two gates leaves you with more runners, and steer into that one before the pair reaches you.

The trap is that a multiply gate isn't automatically the better pick just because multiplication feels stronger than addition. A ×2 gate only beats a +10 gate once your crowd is already bigger than ten — below that, the flat addition wins. The game doesn't do this math for you, so the habit worth building early is a half-second glance at both gates and a rough guess at your current crowd size before you commit to a lane.

Minus and divide gates aren't always worth dodging outright, either. If a shrink gate is immediately followed by a multiply gate, taking the smaller hit first and multiplying the smaller number afterward can occasionally leave you ahead of skipping straight past both — but this only pays off in specific pairings, so treat it as an exception you watch for rather than a rule you plan around.

Steering around logs, spikes and sweeping bars

Beyond the gates, the road throws rolling logs, spike plates and sweeping bars at your crowd, and running into any of them knocks runners off the back of the group. Steering is a drag anywhere on the screen — the whole crowd follows your finger or the mouse as one block, which means the block gets wider as your crowd grows, and a wide crowd needs more room to dodge the same obstacle than a small one did a few seconds earlier.

That widening is the real reason early hesitation costs you late. A crowd that's already trimmed down to a handful of runners can duck a spike plate with a small flick; a crowd swollen past a hundred needs the move started well before the obstacle is actually in front of you, because the edges of the group are the ones that clip it first. Start drifting toward open road as soon as an obstacle appears on screen rather than waiting until it's close enough to look dangerous.

Beating the purple crowds

Purple crowds block the road outright and fight your crowd one runner for one runner when you reach them — whichever side has more runners left standing when the fight ends is the side that keeps moving. This is where the gate math from earlier actually gets tested: a crowd padded out by a couple of easy plus gates right before a purple crowd can turn what would have been a loss into a clean win, and a crowd that took a bad minus-gate lane can walk into a purple crowd it should have out-sized easily.

Because the fight is one-for-one, there's no bonus for winning by a wide margin beyond the runners you have left afterward — so the useful habit is checking the road ahead for a purple crowd before you commit to a shrink gate you'd otherwise take. If a divide gate sits right before a visible enemy crowd, that's exactly the pairing worth eating a slightly worse lane to avoid.

Storming the castle: how stars are counted

The run ends at a castle with its own crowd guarding it, and just like the purple crowds along the road, you need more runners than the castle has to take it. Winning with a bare majority still clears the level, but stars are counted by how many runners you have to spare when the castle falls — arriving with a crowd that dwarfs the castle's earns more than scraping past it by a handful.

That changes how you should treat the last stretch of gates before the castle. Early in a run, taking a slightly worse gate to dodge a nearby obstacle safely is usually fine, because there's time to make it back with the gates that follow. In the final few gates before the castle, prioritize whichever gate gives the bigger number outright, since there's no more road left to recover the runners a bad pick costs you.

Playing on phone, tablet or keyboard

On phone and tablet, Crowd Count runs in the browser with no install — drag anywhere on the screen and the crowd follows, whether that's a swipe from the left edge or a slow drift from the middle of the road. On desktop, the same steering works with a mouse drag, or you can hold the left and right arrow keys instead if you'd rather not track the cursor precisely while watching the gates come up.

Frequently asked questions

Guides & tips

• Games like Count Masters: crowd runners and quick arcade games in your browser

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• Crowd Count — Grow your crowd through the gates and take the castle