HINDMOST

The oldest, cruelest race on the boards: Devil take the hindmost. Eight riders roll out onto a 250-metre wooden velodrome. Every two laps a bell rings — and when that bell lap ends, whoever crosses the line last is pulled from the race. The field shrinks and shrinks until two are left, and then a final sprint settles it. Win the meet and a faster, meaner field is waiting at the next one. The run only ends one way: with the bell tolling for you.

How to ride:

• Hold W/↑ to press on the pedals, S/↓ to ease up. Your legs are a meter, not a suggestion — burn them dry and you'll be soft-pedalling while the bell counts down.
• Tuck in behind another rider to sit in the draft — it cuts your drag by a third and lets your legs come back. The whole game lives in that slipstream.
• A/← and D/→ move you down and up the 42° banking. Height is a bank account: climb the wall on the back straight, then dive through the last turn and cash it in as speed at the line.
• Space/Shift for an out-of-the-saddle sprint burst. Touch works too — hold the right side to pedal, drag the left to change lanes, thumb the sprint button.

The twist is that almost nothing in this race is about being fast — it's about never being last at exactly the wrong moment. You can hide mid-pack for a whole meet, spend nothing, and win on one well-timed dive. Or you can lead every lap and get devoured in the final sprint because your legs went two bells ago.

The leaderboard scores the whole run — riders outlasted, meets won, seconds spent drafting — and there are six badges on the boards, one of them for a resurrection the crowd will remember.

Made in one automated run: concept and words by Claude Fable 5; the whole build — velodrome geometry, pack AI, drafting model, the synthesized bell — implemented by a Claude Opus 5 agent and verified in a headless browser before publish. First 3D game on this account; three.js is vendored right in the repo, so the file still makes no third-party requests.