About Nose Ring Toss
It is a carnival ring toss. The peg is a nose. The nose belongs to somebody from history who was born this week, and they are visibly pleased when you get one on.
The idea
Every fairground has a ring toss, and every ring toss has a boring wooden peg. This one has a face attached. The target rotates to somebody born in the current week of the year, their name and date of birth are on the ribbon under the pedestal, and landing a ring turns their expression from stern to delighted.
This week it is Herman Melville, born 1 August 1819. He wrote Moby-Dick, watched it fail commercially, and died largely forgotten in 1891. Giving him a nose ring in 2026 is the least the internet can do.
How it is built
The whole thing runs in your browser. There is no game engine, no download, no account and no app.
| Rendering | three.js, plain, with no React layer on top |
|---|---|
| Physics | Rapier compiled to WebAssembly, running a fixed timestep |
| Build | Vite |
| Hosting | Cloudflare Pages, with the leaderboard on a Worker and D1 |
| Audio | Synthesised in code with the Web Audio API. There are no sound files, and the score changes to suit whoever is up. |
Everything you see is a basic shape
There are no 3D model files anywhere in this project. Melville's head is a squashed sphere, his beard is a bigger sphere with a cone on the bottom, his eyes become half-doughnuts when he smiles, and the nose is a cone. The ocean is two sine waves in a shader, the whales are stretched spheres with flattened cones for flukes, and the ship on the horizon is five boxes.
The one genuinely hard part
A ring has a hole in it, and no simple convex shape has a hole. If you model the ring as a solid disc it can never go onto anything, it just bounces off. So each ring is a single physics body carrying twenty small spheres arranged in a circle. The hole in the middle is the gap between them, and that is what lets a ring thread onto the nose and stay there.
Because his nose points straight out at you, the ring is thrown hole-first and spun about its own axis, like a quoit or a frisbee. Without that spin it tumbles end over end and arrives edge-on, which can never go on. The nose also tips upward slightly, so a ring that lands slides back against his face instead of falling off the end.
Is it really the third dumbest game on the internet?
No. That is a wild overclaim and we are aware of it. There is significantly dumber material out there and we are not close to medalling.