Somewhere on a cratered patch of moon, three starships are hiding under cloaks. You have a rack of paint missiles and an eight-by-eight grid. Crater Space unblocked is a tidy guessing-and-reasoning game where every miss counts against you and every hit is free.
Jasper Renow-Clarke entered it in the 2021 js13k contest under its phone category, so it is designed for a phone held upright. One round takes a couple of minutes, which makes it easy to squeeze into a short break.
How to play Crater Space
Press PLAY and the grid appears at the top, with 24 missiles lined up below it. Tap any square to fire. A green splat is bare ground and uses up a missile. A pink splat is a hit on a ship and costs you nothing.
The three ships are two, three and four squares long. Each one runs straight across or straight down, and none of them overlap. When every square of a ship is painted, one of the ship icons in the corner goes dark.
You win the round by painting all three ships. Run out of missiles first and the round ends with the ships shown faintly where they were hiding. Lower miss counts are better, and a new best earns gold confetti.
Controls
| To… | Mouse | Touch |
|---|---|---|
| Start a game from the menu | Click either PLAY button | Tap either PLAY button |
| Fire a splat missile at a square | Click the square | Tap the square |
| Play again after a round | Click PLAY AGAIN | Tap PLAY AGAIN |
Tips
- Fire on a checkerboard. Even the shortest ship is two cells long, so hitting every other square is enough to find it somewhere. That halves the cells you need to test.
- Follow a hit in a line. After a pink splat, try the four neighbors. Once you have two hits in a row, keep going in that direction until you hit ground.
- Use the ship icons. If the long ship is already found, a gap of three empty squares might still hide the three-square ship, but nothing bigger.
- Skip squares a ship cannot fit in. A single open cell boxed in by misses on every side cannot hold any ship, so do not waste a missile on it.
Crater Space questions
Do hits use up missiles?
No. Only misses take a missile from your rack of 24. You can keep firing at a ship as long as you are landing on it.
Does the game keep my best round?
Yes. Your record, meaning your lowest miss count on a fully cleared board, is stored in your browser and shown on the board.
Why are there two PLAY buttons?
Both start a fresh random layout under the same rules. They only differ in how the random number generator is seeded, so pick either one.
