Detour

🎮 About This Game

Detour is the asymmetric game in the TwozyGames lineup: the two of you are not playing the same game at all. One is a runner on a thirteen-by-thirteen grid who has to collect three markers as fast as possible. The other never touches the runner and has exactly one verb — drop a wall on the grid, once every second or so. Then you swap, run the identical layout, and whoever was faster takes the round. That swap is the whole design. Most asymmetric games spend their lives being balanced, because one side is always a little stronger than the other; here the sides are measured against each other on the same course by the same two people, so an imbalance cancels rather than needing to be tuned away. There is one rule the architect cannot break: you may cost the runner time, never seal them in. Try to close the last route and the game refuses the wall and says so.

🎯 How to Play

The runner moves with the arrow keys and simply has to touch all three markers; a timer runs from the first frame and that number is the entire score. The architect moves a cursor with WASD and presses Space to place a wall — or just taps the square on a touchscreen, which is the same thing. A bar in the corner shows the cooldown, roughly one wall every three steps the runner takes, so you are choosing where the next wall goes while the runner is still moving through the last one. Walls cannot be placed on the runner's own square, on a marker they have not collected yet, or anywhere that would leave a marker unreachable — that last one is checked properly, on every attempt, and a refused wall does not cost you the cooldown. When the first leg ends, the layout resets to exactly the same markers and the same start, the roles swap, and the second runner is shown the time they have to beat. First to two rounds wins. Solo plays both roles in turn against a CPU that never cheats on speed: the CPU runner moves at exactly the same rate you do, and the CPU architect obeys the same cooldown. Difficulty changes only how well it chooses.

💡 Tips & Strategy

• ▸As the architect, walls only pay if they land on the route the runner is actually taking. A wall dropped somewhere plausible costs a good runner almost nothing — we measured it at about one per cent — while walls placed on their current path cost nearly forty.
• ▸Do not aim at the runner. Aim at the corridor they are about to commit to. By the time a wall appears in front of somebody's nose they are already turning; the wall that hurts is the one two or three squares ahead of where they are looking.
• ▸The three markers are collected in whatever order the runner likes, so think about which one they will go for next and make the cheap route to it expensive. Forcing a re-plan is worth more than adding two squares to a walk.
• ▸As the runner, treat the cooldown bar as your clock. You get roughly three steps between walls, so the moment the bar fills you should already be somewhere the next wall cannot easily hurt you — an open square with two ways out rather than a corridor.
• ▸Runners lose most of their time to backtracking, not to walls. Collect the markers in an order that makes one loop instead of three trips, and you will beat a faster player who chases whichever marker is nearest.
• ▸Remember that the second leg is run on the identical layout, so pay attention while you are the architect: you are learning the map you are about to have to run.
• ▸If you are behind on time in leg two, the aggressive line is usually right — the layout is the same, so you already know roughly where the markers are, and a route you have seen once is cheaper to run than to rediscover.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions