Zetamac is a small, free arithmetic speed drill popular in quantitative-finance interview prep circles: set a timer and an operand range yourself, then answer as many sums as you can. It's about as close as it gets to Math Games' own Race mode. The difference is everything around that one drill: three more games, saved stats, and difficulty levels you don't have to configure by hand.
| Giochi Mate | Zetamac | |
|---|---|---|
| What you see before you can play | Nothing to configure — pick a level, start | A settings form: min/max for each operation, every session |
| How it looks | Illustrated, colour-coded, built as a real product | Plain black text on white — no branding, no design |
| Where it's actually popular | General audience — anyone sharpening mental math | A cult favorite specifically in quant/trading interview prep |
| Proof you're improving | A Stats page: this week vs last, saved automatically | Nothing after you close the tab — screenshot it yourself |
| What four difficulty tiers replace | Manually guessing a good number range | Nothing — there's no tier system, only your own settings |
| Where it runs | Browser and a dedicated iPhone app | Browser only |
Feature comparison as of this page's last update — Zetamac's exact features and free-tier limits change between versions, so check their current listing too.
No subscription. No paywalled game mode.
Zetamac has always been free with no account to create. There's nothing to compare on price — only on what gets saved and what doesn't.
Zetamac looks exactly like what it is: a page built by one person to solve one problem, with no visual design beyond plain text and a settings form. That's not a criticism — it's genuinely popular for exactly that reason among people prepping for quantitative trading interviews, where the drill matters and nothing else does.
Math Games is built the other way: illustrated, colour-coded, with a Lilita One wordmark and bevel cards — a real front door for people who aren't already in a niche community that's heard of it, because most people looking for "mental math practice" have never heard of Zetamac at all.
Every Zetamac session starts with the same small decision: what minimum and maximum do you want for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division? Precise, if you already know what you're doing — one more thing to configure if you don't, every single time, since none of it is remembered between visits.
Math Games replaces that with four fixed tiers — Rookie, Amateur, Pro, Elite — decided once by us instead of by you every session, and moving up is just noticing the current one has gotten easy.
Zetamac shows you a score at the end of a round and then forgets it completely — there's no account for it to save to, so any sense of whether you're actually improving is something you have to track yourself, session to session.
Math Games works exactly the same way with no account — just play — but if you want the history, a Stats page keeps your accuracy, speed and streak automatically, comparing this week against last without you doing anything extra.