One Stroke

One Stroke is a free draw a line physics game: every sheet of a blueprint holds a steel marble in a clamp and a cup somewhere below, and you get exactly one line to get the marble home. Press, drag a single stroke with the red markup pencil, let go, and the marble drops onto your line under real physics. It rolls, picks up speed, flies off the end and either sinks into the cup or sails past it. It is a line puzzle you solve with your hand rather than with a menu, it runs in your browser with no download, and it is one of our physics games.

Press Play and you are in Endless: sheet after sheet until three sheets run out of time. The first five are the classic warm-up, one of each kind. Slope needs a single short line toward the cup. Gap gives the marble a ramp that throws it into a pit unless you add a kicker or a bridge. Bounce hides the cup behind a wall or under a roof, so a spring or a trampoline has to do the work. Pegs scatters the marble through a field of pins, and the Trick shot needs a long swoop up onto a high ledge or a hook under a roof. After that the sheets lean on the hard kinds, half of them trick shots, every clock is a little shorter (18 seconds down to 12) and the ink is rationed: the pen runs dry at two and a half times the sheet's par, then less and less, down to a quarter over par.

Every sheet stays fair. The sheets come from a bank of 648 tested layouts, each checked on both sides by a solver for a line home that fits inside even the tightest ink ration with time to spare on the shortest clock, so a run only ends because the sheets got the better of you, never because one could not be done. Endless walks through the whole bank before a sheet comes back, and the leaderboard ranks how many sheets you brought home first and the points second, so the board tells you how far you got.

The twist is the ink. Every line is measured in millimetres as you draw it, and less ink scores more: a home on the sheet's par is worth the full 1,000 points, twice the par 850, four times 700, and any home at least 300. A miss is never the end of a sheet: the marble goes back to its clamp, your last line stays as a faint guide and you draw again, as often as the clock allows. That makes One Stroke a marble physics game about elegance as much as aim. For a short game there is Five sheets, the classic one-minute run of one sheet of each kind with an 18-second clock and the pen's full ink; it is the version our quick games feed and gauntlets play. Top runs are re-simulated on our servers, which puts it among our competitive games.

The controls are a single gesture, so it plays the same on a phone and on a computer: drag with a finger on mobile games or with the mouse on PC games, and let go to drop the marble. Pressing again while it rolls starts a fresh line, and on a computer P pauses an Endless run. The physics is exact and identical on every device, the marble really rolls along the curve you drew, and the end card lists your last five lines with the ink and the points, which also puts it among our casual games for adults and free games to play at work.