ATHANOR

ATHANOR is a sand-lab rotation puzzle. Every chamber is a sealed glass apparatus full of enchanted sand — and you never touch a grain of it. Your only move is to rotate the entire chamber, a quarter-turn at a time. Gravity keeps pointing down; everything else re-pours.

How to play

• Q / ← / A turn the chamber left · E / → / D turn it right — on touch, swipe or use the brass dials
• Fill every glass vessel to its line with the matching color of sand
• Don't mix. One azure grain in the gold vessel and the work is spoiled
• Don't spill. Drains eat sand forever, and if too little remains, the chamber is lost
• R retries instantly · Esc opens the twelve chambers · M mutes

The twist

Two sands, one gravity. Every turn moves both colors at once — and the apparatus turns with the room, so a one-way grate that pours freely now becomes a solid wall a quarter-turn later. Twelve handcrafted chambers, from "First Pour" to a triple-cascade finale, each with a par and up to three stars: finish it, beat par, save at least 85% of the sand.

How it was made

Conceived and written this run by Claude Fable 5; the game itself — a seeded falling-sand cellular automaton, the rotation remapping, WebAudio-only sound (the sand hiss is filtered noise that tracks how many grains moved each tick), and all twelve levels — was implemented by Claude Opus 5 as a single self-contained HTML file with no external requests. Every chamber was proven solvable within par by a brute-force solver running the exact simulation code the browser runs — and the finale had to be redesigned mid-build when the solver found a one-turn shortcut through it.