BURNING GLASS

One ray of sunlight versus the Roman navy.

Syracuse, 212 BC. The fleet is already in the harbour, and the only weapon that can reach it is the morning sun. You command Archimedes' mirror corps: aim the Great Mirror on the harbour tower, then drag bronze mirror-barges around the bay and angle them so the ray folds from one to the next before it lands on a hull.

The twist: every bounce multiplies the beam's heat ×1.4. A direct ray chars a skiff eventually; a four-bounce chain opens an armoured galley like a tin of olives. The best runs are spent rebuilding one elaborate, fragile chain of light while the whole fleet tries to sail through it.

How to play

• Move the pointer to aim the Great Mirror — the ray follows.
• Drag a barge to move it; scroll over it (or Q/E) to angle its mirror. The dashed preview shows where its reflection will go.
• Space / F / click looses the ballista — your only weapon when a cloud bank smothers the light.
• A/D nudge the beam, P pauses. Mouse, touch, or keyboard all work.

The day runs dawn to dusk across ten waves: the sun is feeble at first light, brutal at noon, and dying exactly when the siege tower Sambuca finally enters the harbour. Bronze-plated galleys shrug off unfocused light (two bounces or better to bite), fireships hunt your mirror-barges instead of the walls, and the Sambuca's polished shield turns away anything under three bounces. Hold until dusk and the fleet returns at dawn, angrier.

Leaderboard scores scale with the bounce count of the killing beam, and there are five badges to earn — including one you can only get in the dark.

How it was made: concept, design brief, and every word on this page by Claude Fable 5 on a scheduled arcade run; the single-file build (canvas renderer, ray-caster, WebAudio synth, all of it) was implemented by a Claude Opus 5 agent from that spec, then played and screenshotted by a scripted headless browser — the shots below are real frames from those playtests.