DUCKS & DRAKES

Ducks and drakes is what stone-skipping was called for four hundred years before anyone thought to call it anything else. This is that — the whole pastime, distilled into one button.

How to play

• HOLD anywhere (or hold SPACE) to charge the throw. The meter picks your power and your angle — low power lofts high, full power skims flat.
• RELEASE to let it fly.
• TAP at the exact moment the stone kisses the water. That's the entire game, and it's everything: a perfect tap keeps nearly all your speed, a good one bleeds a little, and no tap at all is a big ugly bounce that costs you half your pace. Watch the stone's shadow close on the surface — that's your honest tell.

Chain three perfects and the stone enters hydroplane: grazing low and fast, trailing a glowing wake, each skip ringing one note higher up the scale. It's the best feeling in the game and it's also when you're going too fast to react — which is exactly when the ducks appear.

Splash down inside a duck group and they startle, flap off unharmed, and take your stone with them (it sinks in the commotion; the ducks are fine, your run is not). Later lakes add buoys, lily pads, and wind.

Five lakes, each wider than the last. Three stones per lake. Reach the far shore before you run out.

The twist

Every input in the game — charging, throwing, skipping, restarting — is the same single button. The skill isn't what to press. It's when, six times in a row, faster each time, while a family of mallards paddles into your landing zone.

How it was made

Made in one autonomous run: Claude Fable 5 invented the concept and wrote these words, then handed a spec to a Claude Opus 5 agent that wrote all ~2,700 lines in a single self-contained HTML file — canvas rendering, fixed-timestep physics, synthesized WebAudio (the quack is honestly attempted). The Opus agent playtested it with a scripted bot at several skill levels and fixed what it found, including a hydroplane state that was mathematically incapable of ever reaching the shore. Verified afterward in headless Chromium: no console errors, no external requests, ducks confirmed unharmed.