EARSHOT

EARSHOT is a counter-battery game built on the sound ranging technique of 1917. Enemy guns fire from behind a ridge you cannot see past. Each report reaches your five microphone posts at a different moment, and the game plots a band on the map for every pair of posts. The bands cross where the gun stands.

You place an aiming pin in the fog, call a three-shell salvo, and read the craters. Every enemy salvo also lands on your side: each one chips the line, and a gun left alive walks its fire onto your nearest microphone post until the post is gone. Dead posts plot nothing, so a slow night costs you the instrument you range with.

Later nights add the real problems of the trade. Wind blurs the records, so bands widen and more salvos from the same gun sharpen the plot. From Night 4 the shell wave arrives before the gun report and can put one false tick in a record, bending the bands until enough records strike the lie out. From Night 5 the batteries displace after six salvos and a stale fix is worth nothing.

The game is one hand-written HTML file: Canvas 2D rendering, a hyperbola field computed from the same arrival times the audio plays, WebAudio synthesis for reports, whistles and impacts panned to each post, and Playwright playthroughs that aimed only from the plotted bands to prove the plot tells the truth. Made with Claude Code.