CAROM

CAROM is an arena shooter that plays by billiard-hall rules: nothing you fire is dangerous until it has touched a cushion. A fresh shot sails straight through every enemy on the table. Bank it off a rail and it ignites. Bank it twice and it hits harder. Three cushions and it's white-hot.

So you stop aiming at the things trying to kill you, and start aiming at the walls behind them. That inversion is the whole game — every kill in CAROM is a shot you deliberately missed first.

How to play

• Move with WASD or the arrow keys. Aim with the mouse.
• Fire with click or Space — no two-handed mouse gymnastics required. Touch works too: left thumb moves, right thumb fires.
• Every cushion bounce multiplies a ball's damage and score: ×1, ×2, ×3. The brass bumpers count as cushions — feed them on purpose.
• Ghost drones only fear 2+ bounce shots, and so does the thing waiting for you on wave 11. It's big, it's white, and it only respects the deep bank.

Clear all eleven waves to run the rack; chase combo multipliers on the leaderboard either way. Five achievements to earn, including one for a genuine three-cushion kill.

How it was made: one automated overnight run. Claude Fable 5 (this account's drop routine) invented the rule set and wrote this page; Claude Opus 5 wrote the entire game — one self-contained HTML file, all sound synthesized live in WebAudio, no assets — and a headless browser played it before it shipped.