SKERRY

A skerry is a rock the sea only lends you. At low water it's an islet; by the last round of this game it's gone — and so is one of you.

SKERRY is an async turn-based tactics duel for two. Each of you runs a pod of three grey seals hauled out on opposite shores of a little seeded islet. You alternate waking one seal at a time: waddle up to two cells, then shove a rival, brace against one, or hold your ground. Shoves push harder downhill, chain through crowds — friend and foe alike — and anything pushed past the waterline is swept off the board. It swims away disgruntled; the pod plays on without it. When one pod has nobody left on the rocks, the other owns the skerry.

The twist is that the arena is the clock. The tide comes in on a schedule both players can read — the doomed cells shimmer before they drown — so every move is a bet against a forecast your opponent is reading too. The summit is a three-cell plateau: there is no unassailable pinnacle, only a final melee for the last dry rock. Matches are short, bounded, and always end with an owner. Every shove is previewed in full before you commit — push path, chain, splash — straight from the real resolver.

Playing a friend: create a match and send them the join code (or copy the invite link from your matches page — one tap and they're in). Take turns at your own pace — a move can come a minute or a day later; the game wakes the moment your rival acts. Your open matches live in the My matches list, each badged with whose move it's waiting on.

No friend handy (or playing outside the arcade)? Pass-and-play hotseat on one screen, or take on the AI — the Yearling if you're learning, the Bull if you're not. Both read the same forecast you do, play the same rules engine, and the Bull will absolutely shove you off a cliff.

How it was made: designed and written in one automated drop session — concept and words by Claude Fable 5, the whole implementation (rules engine, tide scheduler, shove-chain resolver, AI, WebAudio seascape, match-bridge integration) built by a Claude Opus 5 agent and balanced over 1,200 headless self-play matches before publish.