Scorched Borough

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 toward where you want the shell to go (start anywhere on the battlefield), or use the angle slider	`←` `→`
Set power	Drag farther from your tank for a harder shot, 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: its next shot blows up in its own face.

Buried tanks. When dirt piles up over a tank’s turret, that tank is buried. It shows as a dashed outline under the mound with a Buried tag over it. A buried tank can still fire, but the shell can’t get out: it goes off right on top of the tank, wherever it was aimed. That costs the tank that fired it 30 armor with a Standard shell, 36 with the Splitter (all five bomblets at once) or 45 with a Heavy (a little more if it drops into the Heavy’s deeper crater). The other tank is only hurt if it is close enough to catch the blast. The crater usually digs the tank out in one go. A Dirt Bomb fired while buried just piles on more dirt. The CPU plays by the same rule.

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.
Dirt doesn’t let a shell through. A tank buried past its turret can’t shoot out: its shell goes off where it sits (see Buried tanks). A tank whose turret still shows, or a barrel that only pokes into a mound, is fine: the shell pushes up through the loose dirt until it reaches open air.

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. When it is buried, it doesn’t aim at all: it digs itself out with a Standard shell, the cheapest way out.

Records

Win a match and you can post it to the monthly records board under a nickname. Points reward a quick, clean win against a tough opponent:

A win starts at 1,000 points.
Every shot you fire in the two rounds you win costs 40. A round the CPU takes doesn’t count.
That total, never less than 100, is multiplied by the difficulty: ×1 on Easy, ×2 on Normal, ×3 on Hard.

So a 2⁠–⁠0 win on Hard in six shots is worth 3 × (1,000 − 240) = 2,280 points, and a 2⁠–⁠1 win on Normal with fifteen shots in the two rounds you won is worth 2 × (1,000 − 600) = 800. The board can check every shot you fire, but not how well the CPU shot, so nothing the CPU does moves your points: not the round it took, and not the armor you have left. When two records tie, the one posted first ranks higher.

The board starts fresh at midnight New York time on the 1st of every month. Each nickname keeps its best score of the month.

Every record is checked. While you play, the game keeps a short log of the match: its random seed, the difficulty and each shot either tank fired, as an angle, a power and a weapon. The board replays the whole match from that log with the same game code, round by round: the same terrain, the same wind, the same craters and falls. A post only counts if the replay ends in your win, and the board works out the points itself. That only works if the replay lands every shell exactly where it landed for you, so the physics stays away from anything a browser is allowed to round its own way, like the built-in sine and cosine, and uses its own versions instead.

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.
A Dirt Bomb doesn’t have to be a direct hit. Land it close and the CPU is buried, so its next turn goes into blowing itself out of the ground for 30.
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. Clearing site data resets them. Quitting or leaving a match once you have fired a shot counts as a loss. Nothing leaves your browser unless you post a record; then the board gets your nickname, the points and the log of that match.

How do I play on a phone?

Put a finger on the battlefield and drag toward where you want the shell to go. The barrel follows your finger, and the farther your finger is from your tank, the harder the shot. Then tap Fire. Portrait works fine; turning the phone sideways gives you a bigger battlefield with the controls on the side.

My tank is buried. What now?

Fire a Standard shell. It goes off on top of you and costs 30 armor, but its crater usually digs you out in one shot. A Heavy costs 45 and digs a much bigger hole; the Splitter costs 36 and digs the smallest one. A Dirt Bomb costs nothing and buries you deeper, so if you had it picked, your turn starts on the Standard instead. Your aim doesn’t matter while you are buried. The Buried tag over your tank and the warning on the battlefield tell you when this applies.

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.

When does the records board reset?

At midnight New York time on the 1st of each month. Only wins can be posted, and each nickname keeps its best score of the month.

Why wasn’t my record accepted?

The board replays every match before it takes it. A match it can’t replay to the same win, for example one played in a version of the game from before an update, is turned away. Reload the page and the next win will post.

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.