A Few Half-Baked Games (Now Playable Here)

Cochetopa has gradually become the place where I put projects that are too experimental for my professional website, but too interesting to leave sitting in a folder on my computer. Lately, that has meant browser games.

I use the word “games” somewhat generously here. A couple are recognizably games, a couple are closer to simulators, and all of them have at least one feature that probably began with me wondering, “Could I make this work in one web page?” They are small projects, but they are now playable directly on the site with no download or account required.

Ball Crusher

Ball Crusher v1.0 is the most straightforward of the group. You aim a line of balls into a field of numbered blocks, use the walls to build better ricochets, and try to clear each row before the blocks work their way to the bottom.

It started as a quick physics experiment and then accumulated levels, pickups, scoring, sound, keyboard controls, mobile scaling, and a surprising amount of work around making a nearly horizontal bank shot behave consistently. Drag, release, and hope your geometry was better than it looked.

Play Ball Crusher →

Euchre

Euchre v0.5 exists because euchre is easy to explain as “a simple card game” right up until the left bower changes suits, somebody gets euchred, or the dealer is forced to call trump.

This version lets you play a complete game with three bots. It includes adjustable AI difficulty, stick-the-dealer and farmer’s-hand options, going alone, proper bowers, follow-suit enforcement, and a quick rules panel for anyone who did not grow up somewhere that euchre was treated as common knowledge. You play South, your bot partner sits North, and the other two bots will occasionally make choices that feel either tactical or personally offensive.

Play Euchre →

SailTutor

SailTutor v4 is more simulator than game. It puts a small sailboat on a world map and asks you to steer and trim the sails according to the wind. It distinguishes true and apparent wind, tracks point of sail, lets the boat stall in irons, and gives some coaching when the sail trim is clearly not helping.

The fun part is that you can move the boat nearly anywhere. The simulator can use current Open-Meteo wind conditions or fall back to its own wind field, so sailing Lake Michigan and sailing off the coast of New Zealand can become meaningfully different little experiments. Keyboard and touch controls are both included.

Try SailTutor →

Mountain Pine Beetle Landscape Lab

The Mountain Pine Beetle Landscape Lab v0.9 is the project that most directly overlaps with my forestry interests. You choose an outbreak origin on a map, load mapped pine-host information and climate context, and then step or run a simple spread simulation through time.

I deliberately call it a landscape lab because it is not a calibrated outbreak forecast. It is still useful for playing with the relationships among host presence, climate, dispersal, mortality, and the arbitrary decisions that have to be made when turning ecological ideas into a working model. You can change generation rate, climate weight, dispersal, reproduction, and mortality, then watch the same starting point produce a very different landscape pattern.

Open the Mountain Pine Beetle Landscape Lab →

There are earlier versions of most of these projects still listed on the Games page, mostly because I like being able to see how the experiments changed. The links above point to the versions I would actually recommend playing.

They are still side projects. There will be rough edges, questionable bot decisions, and probably a sailboat somewhere it should not be. But they work, they are free, and they now have a better home than a folder called newest_version_final_2.