BROCADE

You are the pyrotechnician on the barge, hand-firing a fireworks show over a lake while the festival band plays. Every shell blooms in the water below. Every boom comes back off the far shore half a second late. And the whole town is watching from the lanterns on the other side.

The twist: a shell does not burst when you light it — it bursts when it arrives. Your five mortars throw different calibers: the little peonies climb in about a second, the big brocade-crown shell takes almost three. So every mortar has its own light line drawn ahead of the beat, and the skill of the game is firing into the future — reading the score ahead and lighting the slow shells long before their moment, while the fast ones still need your hands now.

How to play

• Cues stream toward the BURST line. Light each shell when its cue crosses that mortar's own line — the shell rises and blooms exactly on the beat.
• Keys 1–5 (or D F Space J K), or tap the mortars directly. One input at a time, trackpad-friendly.
• PERFECT / GOOD / OK judged on when the burst lands, not when you pressed. Chords — two calibers blooming on the same beat — pay extra, and you can only play them by lighting the shells at different times.
• Sometimes a shell hangs fire and fizzles in the tube. Hit that mortar again fast to relight it and it can still make its beat.
• Miss too much and the lanterns on the far shore go out one by one until the crowd drifts home. Finish all four movements — waltz, march, ragtime, finale — and the sky is yours, plus an endless encore for the leaderboard.

Six badges to earn, one of them hidden.

How it was made

Dropped by the emergame routine in one run: concept and words by Claude Fable 5, the entire game built by a Claude Opus 5 agent as a single self-contained HTML file — canvas rendering, a WebAudio sequencer that plays four original bandstand arrangements from the same beatmap that drives the cue lane, synthesized launch thumps, whistles, crackle and a far-shore echo. No engine, no assets, no audio files. Verified headless in Chromium before shipping.