Flock has exactly one input — you move — and one rule: sheep run away from whoever stands close. Everything below follows from that rule and from the game's own numbers, because Flock was balanced in a simulation before it was a game, and the simulation left behind facts that decide more matches than quick thumbs do.
Chasing is worthless — we measured it
In the balance simulation, a bot that ran straight at the nearest sheep beat a bot that wandered at random about half the time. Read that again: chasing performed like not trying. A bot that instead walked to the far side of the sheep — so that fleeing means walking home — beat the chaser 99 games in 100. You move at 1.5× a sheep's top speed, so you will always win the footrace around the flock; the whole skill is choosing which side of the animal to stand on. When the game's READY screen says sheep run away from you, it is not flavour text. It is the entire strategy chapter.
Herd groups, not singles — the 81% edge
Your fear radius is wide enough to push two or three grazing sheep at once, and the flock drifts back together on its own — sheep near each other stay loosely bunched. That means a shepherd standing behind a cluster is delivering multiple animals for one walk, and the measured gap is not subtle: in simulation, a cluster-herder beat an otherwise identical single-sheep herder 81% of the time. Before you commit to a target, scan for pairs. A lone sheep close to your pen is often worth less than two sheep slightly farther out.
The approach matters as much as the target. If you are on the pen side of the sheep, do not barge through the middle of the flock to get behind it — every animal you brush past scatters. Circle outside the fear ring. The arc costs about two seconds; a scattered flock costs ten.
The panic ring is a clock both of you can read
When both shepherds crowd the same sheep at once, an amber ring starts filling over it. About a second and a half of sustained double pressure fills it — then the sheep bolts at over double speed in a random direction, ignoring both of you, and cannot panic again for a few seconds. This is the endgame's tiebreaker, and it cuts both ways. If your rival is walking a sheep home and you cannot get around them in time, crowding the sheep with them turns their guaranteed capture into a coin flip — a trade the trailing player should always take. By the same logic, when you are the one delivering, keep your body between your sheep and your rival so they can never start the ring at all. Win the angle before they arrive and the panic never happens.
Nine sheep, majority five: count before you commit
The flock never respawns, so every sheep is zero-sum, and nine is odd on purpose — a completed round cannot tie. That makes the endgame pure arithmetic. At 4-3 with two sheep loose, the leader needs one and the trailer needs both: if you are ahead, take whichever sheep your rival is not contesting and ignore the bait; if you are behind, contest everything, because an uncontested delivery ends the round. The 90-second clock resolves stalls — higher count takes the round at zero, and a tie arms a golden sheep where the next capture wins. One more measured fact: camping your rival's pen mouth loses. A shepherd pushing from right behind a sheep outweighs a defender's repulsion from farther away — the fear force falls off with the square of distance — so deliveries squeeze past a camper, and our simulated pure-camper lost every match it played.
What the difficulty setting actually changes
The CPU shepherd never cheats: same speed cap, same fear physics, same pen fence. Easy and Normal both play the get-behind-and-push policy, differing only in reaction lag and aim error — Easy replans slowly at 85% speed, Normal is quicker and straighter. Hard is a different mind, not a faster one: it plays the cluster-herding policy from the section above, the one with the 81% edge. If Hard beats you, it did not out-run you — it out-positioned you, and the fix is to start herding groups yourself.
Flock is free, needs no download or login, and two people can play it on one phone — each player gets half the screen and a floating stick, because a game with no buttons splits a touchscreen perfectly. Load Flock, and remember: the sheep does the walking.
