Turf Grab

Turf Grab is a multiplayer-style territory arena that runs entirely in your browser against bots, so a quick round starts the moment the page loads. The board is one big sheet of squared paper. You hold a small patch of pastel colour and a marker that only ever changes direction, never stops. Leave your patch and you start drawing a line; bring that line back into any ground you own and the shape you have just drawn is filled in, corner to corner, in your colour. Cut across a neighbour and their squares change hands too.

The line behind you is the whole risk. While you are outside your own ground, any rival who drives over it takes you out and every square you held drops back to blank paper. Run over your own line and you have boxed yourself in. Do it to somebody else and their ground is suddenly open for whoever loops around it first. A dash on the space bar gives you a second of extra speed, which is enough to close a loop in front of somebody or break away from one of the sharks who like to sit near your line and wait.

The rivals fluctuate between 12 and 20 as players are cut and new ones arrive, and they do not all play the same way. Rookies wander and get themselves killed, regulars take sensible bites out of the middle, sharks hunt whoever is exposed, and the careful ones farm the quiet edges. They get bolder as their patch grows, they remember who cut them and come back for it, and they pause and misjudge the way a person would. A top-10 board shows everyone's share of the map, a feed calls out every claim and every kill, and a minimap keeps the whole sheet in view. The round ends when somebody reaches 40 percent or after four minutes, whichever comes first, and your best rank and best share are kept in your browser so there is always a high score waiting to be beaten.