Coil

About the game

Coil is played entirely with the mouse pointer. Wherever you move it, a thin glowing line follows, like the tail of a comet. Blue orbs appear around the dark board, and the way to destroy them is to draw a loop around them: as soon as the trail crosses itself and closes a circle, everything inside it is captured.

Blue orbs do not wait forever. Each one starts to flash after a while and then bursts, and every orb that bursts on its own drains a big piece of the energy bar at the top of the screen. Capturing orbs restores a little of it. Red orbs are the opposite: they fade away on their own if you leave them alone, and enclosing one by mistake costs as much energy as letting a blue one burst. The game ends when the energy runs out, and your score is the time you lasted, multiplied by how well you played.

Catching several orbs in one loop raises the multiplier shown at the top, up to four, so the best strategy is to wait for a few blue orbs to gather and sweep them up together, without letting any of them burst and without dragging a red one into the circle. Later on some orbs start drifting around the board, which makes that much harder. Hakim El Hattab made Coil in 2011 as one of his browser experiments; behind the board, a WebGL effect bends the background grid and lights it up where orbs are captured.

Playing it here

Click Play, then Start Game. The board is shown scaled to fit the player. A game usually lasts a minute or two, and when it ends your score appears with a button to play again; scores are not saved. If the game runs slowly on your computer, a message offers to turn off the background effects. The bar at the top of the page, "Expand for more info", shows the author's credits.

This is the game as the author published it, with the share buttons removed, the fonts served from this site and a small fix to the background effect that modern browsers need, the same one the author made on his own site. It plays with a mouse or on a touch screen.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Big loops are slow. A small, quick circle around an orb is safer than a huge sweep across the board.

Group them. Waiting a moment for two or three blue orbs to sit close together and taking them in one loop pays off in multiplier.

Leave the red ones alone. They disappear by themselves; draw around them, never over them.

Watch for flashing. An orb that has started to flash is about to burst; catch it first.

Credits and licence

Coil was created by Hakim El Hattab and is released under the MIT licence. It uses jQuery (MIT) and the Molengo (SIL Open Font License) and Ubuntu (Ubuntu Font Licence) fonts. The licence texts and the source code are linked from this page.