Artillery Hills

Two clay tanks face each other across a ridge of rolling hills, cut like a slice of cake so you can see the layered earth inside. One is green, one is rust red, and in the valley behind them a whole war is going on in miniature: two lines of trenches, field guns flashing, puffs of earth thrown up and drifting off on the wind, a lumbering early tank and two biplanes chasing each other round the sky. The two tanks on the hills are what you play; the war behind is the weather.

How it plays

The tanks take turns. On yours, turn the barrel up or down, set the power, and fire. The shell flies in a long arc, pulled down by gravity and pushed along by the wind, which changes a little every turn and is shown at the top of the screen. Where it lands, it presses a crater into the clay, and a shell that lands close to a tank dents it. Three good hits and that tank is out; the other side holds the hills.

Play against the computer at three levels, or hand the device back and forth for two players. On a keyboard, the left and right arrows turn the barrel, up and down set the power, and the space bar fires. On a touch screen the buttons at the bottom do the same, and you can hold them down.

The computer aims the way a person would: it tries the shot in its head against the hills as they are now and the wind, then fires. On Easy it is off by quite a bit, on Medium by a little, and on Hard it rarely misses by much, so moving the ground under it with your own shots and making it work for every hit matters.

Tips

The wind matters more on long, high shots than on short, flat ones, so a low shot is the safer one on a windy turn. Every crater changes the hills: dig away the ridge between you and the other tank and your flat shots get through, or dig away the ground right under it and it sits lower, harder to reach. When the wind is strong and against you, aim high and let it carry the shell back.

Artillery Hills needs WebGL; on a machine without it the page says so, and the 2D games in the arcade still work. Nobody is hurt in the game or in the war behind it: the tanks are dented clay, and a soldier caught by a burst in the valley is knocked flat, gets up and goes back to his trench.

Play Artillery Hills (free, in the browser; back to all games)