Cat Curling

Cat Curling starts as a perfectly ordinary game of curling. You drag back and let go to send a cat sliding down the ice on its belly, paws out, shouting WHEEE, while two grannies with leaf blowers run alongside it. Tap or rub the ice while it slides and they blow it further. Points are the cats that come to rest in the house, the big target at the far end. No cats are harmed; they enjoy it enormously.

The rule that makes it hard to keep things ordinary: whenever one cat hits another hard enough, both of them pop into three cats with a loud BOING. One good shot into a crowded house sets off a chain that fills it with cats, and the score goes up accordingly. Then, without anybody explaining why, the rink is on the roof of a moving bus. After that it is a pizza on a frozen lake, then the cats are the size of cars, and then it is a comet in space, where every cat in the house is worth a million points.

Every run ends the same way: all the cats you made roll up into one enormous ball of cats, the grannies blow it into the button, and the button is the Earth. The Earth is fine. A run takes about two minutes, so it is a quick game to have another go at, and your high score is saved in your browser. Every finished run also gives Gary, the orange cat who goes first, a new hat, until he has all eight. It plays with a mouse, a keyboard or a finger. P pauses and M mutes.