Questions people actually ask
Controls, scoring, sound, and why your rings keep bouncing off.
Playing
How do I play?
Drag to aim, hold to charge the power meter, then let go to throw. You get ten rings per round. Thread one onto the nose and it is a ringer. Press R on a keyboard, or use the menu, to start again.
Why do my rings keep bouncing off?
Because the ring has to arrive nearly dead centre. The nose points straight out at you, so you are threading a ring onto it end-on, like a quoit. A few centimetres off and the ring hits the side of the nose, or his face, and drops.
The dotted line shows exactly where the ring will go, so line it up on the tip of the nose before you release. Small aim corrections matter far more than power does. Roughly one throw in five should land once you have the range.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, and that is mainly what it is designed for. Touch and hold to start charging, slide your thumb to adjust the aim, then lift off to throw. It works in portrait or landscape.
Whose face is that?
Someone from history born during the current week. Their name and date of birth are on the ribbon under the cask he is standing on. Right now it is Herman Melville, born 1 August 1819, author of Moby-Dick.
Sound
How do I turn the music off?
Open the menu using the button in the top corner. Sound effects and background music have separate toggles, so you can keep the clatter and lose the strings. Your choice is saved on your own device.
Why is there no sound at all?
Browsers refuse to play audio until you have interacted with the page, so sound starts when you press the play button on the title screen. If it is still silent, check the toggles in the menu and your device is not on silent.
Where did the music come from?
It is generated by the game as it plays. There are no audio files in this project at all: the whoosh, the clatter, the bell, the strings and the guitar riff are all synthesised in code with the Web Audio API. The music changes to suit whoever is on the pedestal: Melville gets brooding classical strings, not a fairground organ.
The leaderboard
How does the leaderboard work?
When your ten rings are gone you can put a name to your score. The board shows the top twenty. Ties are broken by whoever got there first.
Why is there a checkbox before I can submit?
It is a Cloudflare Turnstile check, and it is there to keep automated submissions off the board. It is usually invisible and takes no effort. It is not a tracking cookie and it does not identify you.
Can people cheat?
The game runs in your browser, so anyone determined enough can lie to the server about their score. There is no way around that short of running the whole simulation server side.
What we do instead is make it tedious: each round is issued a signed token that cannot be reused and cannot be submitted faster than a real round takes to play, scores outside the possible range are rejected, and the whole thing is rate limited. That stops scripted spam, which is the actual problem.
Can I get a name removed from the board?
Yes. Obvious abuse gets filtered automatically, and anything that slips through can be deleted. See the Privacy page for how to ask.
Everything else
Is it free? Are there ads?
It is free, there is no advertising, there is nothing to buy, there is no account to make and there is nothing to install.
It runs badly on my machine.
The game leans on WebGL and WebAssembly. If it is choppy, close other tabs, and if you are on a laptop make sure it is not in a battery saver mode that caps the frame rate. A browser from the last few years is required.
Is it really the third dumbest game on the internet?
No. See About for a full and frank retraction.