Flock

🎮 About This Game

Flock is a two-shepherd duel over one flock of nine sheep, and it is the first game on this site with no action button at all — movement is the entire input. The whole rulebook is a rule you already know from real life: sheep run away from whoever stands near them. Walk at a sheep and you lose it; stand on the far side of it and it trots home ahead of you. First to pen five sheep takes the round, and a match is best of three rounds. Because the flock never respawns, every sheep is zero-sum — one you pen is one your rival can never have. The early round is quiet route-planning; the endgame is not. When the last sheep stands between two shepherds who both need it, you cannot simply wrestle for it: an animal cornered by both players at once panics and bolts in a random direction, straight past whoever was feeling smug. Win the angle before your rival arrives, or gamble on the panic.

🎯 How to Play

Move with WASD or the arrow keys — there is nothing else to press. In 2-player mode P1 takes WASD and P2 the arrows; on a phone each player gets half the screen and a floating stick appears under whichever thumb touches down. Sheep flee from any shepherd inside their fear radius, and the faint dashed ring around your shepherd shows exactly how close "too close" is. To herd a sheep, circle around it and approach from the side opposite your pen: it runs from you, which now means it runs toward home. Your pen is the fenced corral on your edge of the pasture — sheep can walk in, shepherds cannot. A round is one flock of nine. Pen five and the round is yours; win two rounds for the match. Each round carries a 90-second clock — on expiry the higher count takes the round, and a tie triggers a golden sheep: next capture wins. Watch the amber ring that appears over a sheep when both shepherds crowd it at once — when it fills, the sheep bolts at double speed in a random direction and ignores both of you until it calms down. Solo mode plays a CPU shepherd on Easy, Normal or Hard; it obeys exactly the same physics you do.

💡 Tips & Strategy

• ▸Never walk straight at the sheep you want. A chase pushes it away from you in whatever direction it happens to be facing — in the simulation behind this game, pure chasing beat random wandering about half the time, i.e. not at all. Get behind it first and let the sheep do the walking.
• ▸Herd groups, not singles. Two or three sheep grazing together can all be pushed by one shepherd standing behind the cluster, and delivering pairs is close to twice the rate of delivering singles — in our measurements, a group-herder beat an otherwise identical single-sheep herder 81% of the time.
• ▸Approach in an arc. If you are standing on the pen side of your target, circling around outside the fear ring costs you two seconds; barging through the middle scatters the flock and costs ten.
• ▸The fear ring works for defense too: stand on the line between a loose sheep and your rival's pen and you are blocking a delivery without touching anything.
• ▸Do not camp your rival's pen mouth. It feels clever and it loses: a shepherd pushing from right behind a sheep outweighs your repulsion from farther away — the fear force falls off with the square of distance — so deliveries squeeze past you, and while you stand there your own pen earns nothing. Our measured pure-camper lost every single match.
• ▸Use the panic deliberately. If your rival has a sheep almost home, crowding it together with them starts the amber ring — a bolt is a coin flip, and a coin flip is strictly better than their guaranteed capture.
• ▸In the endgame, count before you commit. At 4-3 with three sheep left, the leader needs one and the trailer needs everything — if you are ahead, take whichever sheep your rival is NOT contesting; if you are behind, contest everything and pray for good bolts.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions