PIPSQUEAK

PIPSQUEAK is a sector fighter control game set in 1940. You run the plotting table, and you never leave it: the raids, the fighters and the fight all happen through markers on a map.

Radar plots each raid while it is over the sea, with position error and a rough strength and height. Once a raid crosses the coast, only scattered observer posts report it. Scramble your three squadrons, click the map to vector them, set their angels, and put them onto the raid before its bombs reach the towns. Arriving above the raid multiplies your kill rate. Arriving below is close to useless. Fuel, ammunition and rearm cycles decide how many interceptions each squadron can fly. From wave 3 the enemy flies feints, from wave 4 the raids come escorted, and a bombed radar station takes your sea picture with it.

The twist is the pip-squeak clock. Each squadron transmits a true position only during its quarter of the 20-second clock. Between fixes the table dead-reckons from your orders, and the reckoning knows neither the wind nor each squadron's real airspeed, so the hollow counters drift off the truth and snap back at the next fix. Learning how far to distrust your own picture is most of the game.

Built as a single HTML file: Canvas 2D rendering, WebAudio synthesis for every sound, and the Arcade SDK for scores, achievements and saved bests. Balance, touch play and keyboard-only play were verified with headless Playwright runs.