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Empire of Sugar
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About the game
You start with one unicorn, a bathtub in the corner and no idea what lies beyond the clouds. Empire of Sugar is a turn-based game played on a pastel grid that is hidden under a fog of cloud tiles. Walk, and the clouds clear: a fountain here, a lollipop there, a present waiting on a plate.
The heart of it is the rainbow. When a unicorn lines up with a fountain or a lollipop, it casts a rainbow, and each kind of rainbow pays a different currency. Through a fountain you earn water, which pays for your steps. Through a lollipop you earn sweets, which buy new unicorns. Water without unicorns is wasted and unicorns without water cannot move, so the game is a constant balancing of the two. A rainbow that keeps shining for a few turns grows in rank and pays more, a new unicorn pays for itself by clearing more of the fog, and the score multiplies with how much of the board you have uncovered.
There are seven boards, from a two-turn tutorial to a huge 25 by 25 map, and each one scores you as a percentage of the author's own best: 100 percent is not a cap. From the fifth board on a rival joins you, a dark unicorn from the opposite corner, played by the game's own bot, and the two of you compete for the middle bathtub. Everything is explained in the game as you go, and you can tap any tile to read what it does.
Almut Kieffer-Jones made Empire of Sugar for js13kGames 2026, where the whole game, zipped, had to fit in 13 kilobytes. The tiles are emojis, drawn with your own system's emoji font, so the unicorn and the clouds look a little different on every device.
Playing it here
Click Play, then click inside the game. The first board is a tutorial of two turns: walk the unicorn, read the notes in the side panel and press End turn. The light bulb in the corner gives a hint if you are stuck. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click / tap a unicorn, then a neighbouring square | walk there (costs water) |
| Click / tap any tile | read what it is |
| End turn | pass the turn |
| Light bulb | show a hint |
| Magnifier + / - | zoom the board in and out |
| Music and sound buttons | turn them on or off |
A few things worth knowing
Balance the two incomes. Water pays for every step and sweets buy unicorns, so build both rainbows early.
Standing between a fountain and a lollipop lets a single unicorn light one of each at the same time.
Buy unicorns early. Each new one clears more clouds and lights more rainbows, and the score multiplies with the part of the map you have cleared.
Credits and licence
Empire of Sugar was created by Almut Kieffer-Jones and is released under the MIT licence. The music and sound effects play through the SoundBox player by Marcus Geelnard (zlib licence). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is on GitHub.