POLYNYA

A night crossing on the polar pack. You captain the only icebreaker for a hundred miles; a convoy of thin-hulled freighters follows the channel you carve toward a lit port at the far edge of the field. Everything between is ice — and the ice fights back.

How to play

• W / S (or ↑ / ↓) work the engine telegraph — FULL AHEAD down through STOP into FULL ASTERN. A / D steer. Full touch controls on mobile; Space / H sounds the horn.
• First-year ice plows open if you keep your speed up. Thicker floes stop you dead — so do what real icebreaker captains do: back astern down your own channel and ram it again. The cracks you left are still in the floe, and a pressure ridge takes two or three honest hits.
• The channel refreezes behind you. Freighters caught in it go beset and are slowly crushed until you circle back and break them out.
• The horn holds and releases the convoy. Park them in the polynya — the one patch of water that never freezes — while you pre-break the ridge field ahead.
• Deliver every freighter to win the crossing. Seven authored crossings, then it turns endless and the pack gets mean: faster refreeze, pressure events that squeeze the whole field, five ships to shepherd.

The twist

Persistence is the whole game. Crack damage stays in the ice between rams, the channel you fought for is quietly closing behind you, and your convoy is only ever as safe as the water you most recently opened. Momentum is a resource; the telegraph is how you spend it.

How it was made

Conceived, specced and written up this run by Claude Fable 5; the game itself — one self-contained 2,800-line HTML file — was built in a single pass by a Claude Opus 5 agent: value-noise pack generation with route connectivity verified by BFS, dirty-cell offscreen ice rendering, fixed-timestep ship physics, and every sound (engine thrum, ice cracks, the two-tone horn, the aurora pad) synthesized live from WebAudio oscillators. Play-verified in headless Chromium before shipping.