How to play
You and the CPU each get a tank on opposite sides of a patch of the city. Take turns firing. Set the barrel angle and the power, check the wind, and let it fly. Hits knock off armor, and a tank at zero is out. Win two rounds to take the match. You shoot first in rounds 1 and 3; the CPU opens round 2.
The ground is soft. Every blast digs a crater, loose dirt drops into the hole, and a tank parked on the edge can slide in and take a little fall damage on the way down.
A faint line shows where your barrel points, but only for the first stretch. There is no trajectory preview. After each shot a marker stays where your shell landed, with a spotter call like “12 m short,” so you can walk the next one in.
Controls
| To | Mouse or touch | Keyboard |
|---|---|---|
| Swing the barrel | Drag back from your tank like a slingshot, or use the angle slider | ← → |
| Set power | Pull the slingshot farther, or use the power slider | ↑ ↓ |
| Fine adjust | Tap the arrow and plus/minus buttons | Hold Shift for 0.1 steps |
| Pick a weapon | Tap a weapon | 1–4 |
| Fire | The red Fire button | Space or Enter |
| Skip the round result | Tap the battlefield or Next round | Space |
The keys only steer the game while the battlefield is on screen, so the arrow keys still scroll the page when you are down here reading. Holding an arrow key speeds up after a moment.
Weapons
Ammo resets at the start of every round, for you and for the CPU.
- Standard shell Unlimited
- 16 m blast, up to 50 damage on a direct hit. Two clean hits finish a tank.
- Heavy shell 3 per round
- 26 m blast, up to 70 damage, and a crater big enough to drop a tank into. Save it for when your last shot was close.
- Five-Borough Splitter 2 per round
- Breaks into five bomblets at the top of its arc, one for each borough. Each does up to 24. Handy when you are not sure of the wind.
- Dirt Bomb 2 per round
- No damage. Drops a ball of earth that settles into a mound. Build a wall in front of you, or bury the other tank. A buried tank can still fire; its shell pushes up through the loose dirt.
The physics
- Gravity is constant and the same for both tanks. With no wind, 45° carries farthest for a given power.
- Wind changes every turn. The gauge in the scoreboard shows which way it blows and how hard, from 0 to 10 (the cap is 4 on Easy, 8 on Normal, 10 on Hard). It pushes on the shell the whole time it is in the air, so a high, slow lob drifts much more than a flat, fast shot. The clouds and the steam from the stack on the skyline drift with it.
- Edges are walls. A shell that reaches the left or right side bursts against it, so every shot lands somewhere you can see, and a tank parked near a wall can still get caught by the blast. There is no ceiling: a shell that climbs off the top of the screen comes back down, and a small marker follows it along the top edge.
- Fixed timestep. Flight is simulated at 240 steps per second whatever your frame rate, so the same angle, power and wind always land in the same place. The CPU plans with that exact simulation.
- Damage falls off with distance from the center of the blast. A direct hit does the full amount. Falling more than a few meters costs a little armor too.
How the CPU aims
Since the CPU runs the same simulation you are watching, it could hit you every time. It doesn’t. It plays more like a person: it picks a spot that is off by some random amount, reads the wind imperfectly, and after a miss it aims for the other side of you with a smaller error. Long, short, hit. On Easy that error starts large and shrinks slowly. On Hard it usually finds you by the second or third shot, so make your early shots count.
Tips
- Watch the marker, not the shell. Change one thing at a time: power for distance, angle when a hill is in the way.
- Into a headwind, go flatter and harder. With the wind behind you, ease off the power.
- A crater right next to a tank can drop it in. That is free damage, and it throws off the CPU’s range.
- A dirt mound in front of you blocks flat shots, which forces the CPU to lob, and lobs drift.
- When your marker says you were close, switch to the Heavy before you fire again.
FAQ
Is it free? Do I need an account?
Free, no account, nothing to install. It runs in the browser on desktop and phones.
Where are my stats kept?
In this browser’s local storage: wins and losses for each difficulty, your best win streak, and your fastest win in shots. Nothing is uploaded. Clearing site data resets them. Quitting or leaving a match once you have fired a shot counts as a loss.
How do I play on a phone?
Drag back from your tank to aim, then tap Fire. You can also start the drag anywhere on the battlefield. Portrait works fine; turning the phone sideways gives you a bigger battlefield with the controls on the side.
Why can’t I see the whole trajectory?
Because judging it is the game. The aim line only shows direction. The marker and the spotter call tell you how far off you were.
What if one shot takes out both tanks?
The tank that fired loses the round. There are no draws.
Can I turn off the sound or the screen shake?
Yes, with the buttons under the controls. Both settings are remembered. Shake starts off if your device asks for reduced motion.
A nod to Scorched Earth
This is a small tribute to Scorched Earth, the DOS artillery game Wendell Hicken released as shareware in 1991 and billed as “The Mother of All Games.” It had dozens of weapons, shields, a shop between rounds, computer players with names like Moron, Shooter and Cyborg, and room for up to ten people around one keyboard. Scorched Borough keeps only the core of it: angle, power, wind, and dirt that falls. No code or art from the original is used. If you never played it, it is worth looking up.