Crater Space Unblocked

Crater Space puts a familiar guessing game on the surface of a gray, pockmarked moon. Somewhere among its 64 squares, three enemy starships are hiding under cloaking fields, and your only weapon is a rack of paint-splat missiles. Each tap is a small bet. Hit, and the ship lights up pink at no cost; miss, and a missile is gone. Jasper Renow-Clarke made it for the mobile category of js13k 2021, so it fits in a tiny file and plays unblocked with a single thumb on a phone held upright.

The Mission Briefing

Tap PLAY and the moon map takes over the upper part of the display. Underneath you will find your ammunition, 24 missiles in a row, along with three little ship symbols that keep score of what you have found.

The fleet is made of a two-square, a three-square and a four-square vessel. Every one is laid out in a straight horizontal or vertical line, and no two share a square. Fire by tapping a square:

• Green splat: bare moon. One missile in the rack goes dark.
• Pink splat: you hit a ship. That shot costs nothing.

Paint a whole vessel pink and a ship symbol fills in black. Play stops once the fleet is fully painted or your 24 misses are spent, and at that point faint outlines show the true positions.

Your result is your miss count, so smaller is better. A yellow number under the rack keeps a running total. Finish with fewer misses than your record and gold confetti falls; a win that falls short of it still earns a shower of multicolored confetti.

Crater Space controls

To do this	Mouse	Touch
Leave the menu and start	Click either PLAY button	Tap either PLAY button
Fire at a grid square	Click the square	Tap the square
Begin another round	Click PLAY AGAIN	Tap PLAY AGAIN

How to Spend Fewer Missiles

Search, then hunt. Split each round into two modes. In search mode you look for any ship at all. In hunt mode you follow up a pink splat until that ship is finished.

Use a checkerboard search. The smallest vessel spans a pair of squares, so firing only on every other square, like the dark squares of a chessboard, is guaranteed to touch every ship. That halves the squares you need to search.

After one hit, test the four neighbors. A ship continues straight up, down, left or right from a hit. Once a second hit shows the direction, keep firing in that direction until a shot misses, then return to the other end.

Count the space. Near the end, compare gaps on the grid with the ships still missing. If only the 4-long ship is left, any gap shorter than four squares in both directions is empty.

Remember which ship sank. The icons tell you how many ships are done, not which ones. Keep track yourself, because it changes which gaps are still worth searching.

A Quick Game With a Clear Goal

A round lasts a few minutes, and the record gives a clear target to beat. Crater Space suits anyone who likes a little probability with their puzzles. For a version where a computer opponent shoots back at your own fleet, try Fleet Strike, or test deduction in a minefield with Logic Mines.