SIDEPOND

SIDEPOND is a canal lock-keeping game set in the drought summer of 1905. You keep the last lock below the summit pound of a narrow canal. The summit holds nine lockfuls of water, every fill you draw comes out of it, and evaporation takes a share all afternoon. When the water is gone, the canal shuts.

Boats queue in both directions and you work the whole lock yourself: two filling paddles, an emptying pair, two gates, and the side pond paddle. Gates only open when the levels are made. A boat up followed by a boat down costs one lockful between them; two boats the same way cost one each, so the order you serve the queues is the economy. The side pond banks the top half of each emptying and gives it back on the next fill if you work it in the right order.

Speed and care pull against each other. An empty chamber takes water as fast as you can draw it, but with a boat inside the gate paddle will swamp her bow at low water, and a hard empty sets her stern on the lock cill; you get twelve seconds to shut the paddles and run water back in before she holes. Paddles drawn through an open gate send summit water straight to waste. Score is the cargo you pass before the summit runs dry, with bonuses for paired traffic and for pond water returned.

Built as a single hand-written HTML file: Canvas 2D rendering, a head-dependent flow model for the chamber, pond and summit, WebAudio-synthesized sound, and Playwright-scripted keepers that played every seed to the dry end during balancing. Made with Claude Code.