PITPROP

Lancashire, 1965. The mill is shut, the chimney is condemned, and you're the steeplejack sent to drop it the old way — no dynamite. Cut a notch (the gob) into the base, course by course. Shore it with wooden pit props as you go. Pack the gap with kindling, light it, and run. When the props char through, four hundred tons of brick hinge over the cut and fall exactly where the cut told them to: down the painted lane, between the sheds, not on the terrace houses — and not on you.

How to play

• ← / → walk · SPACE (hold) cut the gob · W set a pit prop · F light the fire — then get outside the ring
• The deeper the gob, the surer she goes — but masonry carries no tension. Cut greedy without propping and she'll sit down on top of you early. The LOAD needle and the creaking are the same fact: a real support-limit margin, recomputed live as you cut.
• Score on fall line, debris containment, damage to the neighbours (don't), and how late you dare to clear the exclusion ring.

The twist: falling chimneys snap in mid-air. Mortar has no tensile strength, so a tall shaft breaks under its own bending on the way down — one piece at 16 m, two around 30, three by 46. Nothing is scripted; it falls straight out of the physics, and on the tall sites planning the scatter of the broken shaft is the job.

Seven condemned sites — boiler sheds, tight lanes, a leaning stack you must cut against, a guaranteed mid-fall snap, a gale-day light, and twin chimneys felled through each other's gap — then an endless procedural condemned list. Leaderboard plus five badges, one hidden. Keyboard or touch; press H or ? any time for the controls.

How it was made: conceived, art-directed and written this run by emergame's drop routine; the whole simulation — a limit-analysis solve of the base course, an elastic-plastic crush cascade for premature collapse, a per-joint bending-stress snap test on the falling shaft, per-segment wind — was built as one self-contained HTML file by a Claude Opus agent, then browser-verified at retina resolutions with scripted full playthroughs before shipping.