Boarding

About the game

A passenger paces back and forth along the top of the screen, and below is a scatter of small slanted boards. At the bottom are two gates side by side: a red one on the left and a blue one on the right. Hold the button and the passenger stops pacing almost completely and starts dropping passengers, one after another. Release, and the colour of the next passengers changes from red to blue or from blue to red. The very first press only starts the game and drops nobody.

A dropped passenger falls through the boards, and each board it hits sends it bouncing off to one side or the other. When it reaches the gates, a red passenger is right if it lands on the red half and a blue one is right if it lands on the blue half. A right landing scores one point for each bounce on the way down, and pushes the gate floor back down by a corresponding amount. A passenger who has not bounced at all scores nothing and pushes nothing. A wrong landing costs a point plus one for each bounce, and the gate floor jumps higher.

The gate floor also creeps up all the time, and the game is over when it reaches the top. So you have to keep dropping people, and aim them well, because only the right landings push the floor back, and only the ones that bounce at all.

Boarding is one of the mini-games that Kenta Cho, who works as ABA Games, makes with his crisp-game-lib library. There are no image or sound files: the graphics are drawn by the code, and the sound effects and music are generated while you play.

Playing it here

Click Play, then click, tap or press Space inside the game to start. Nothing is installed or sent anywhere. The best score at the top right is only remembered while the page stays open. Your score can go below zero.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Time the drop. The dropper keeps moving, so the spot you release over decides where the passenger lands.

Bounces are what count. A passenger that goes straight down is worth nothing, so drop over the boards.

Release to switch. Let go between drops to change colour, so you are always sending the right colour towards the matching gate.

Credits and licence

Boarding was made by Kenta Cho (ABA Games) and published under the MIT licence in the crisp-game-lib-games repository. The licence texts of the game, of crisp-game-lib and of the libraries that come with it are linked from this page. The game files are served as published, with only the starting page replaced so that nothing is loaded from other sites.