Vector

🎮 About This Game

Vector is the pencil-and-paper Racetrack game — the one drawn on graph paper in the back of a maths notebook — rebuilt as a turn-based duel with our own measured numbers. Your car is two things: a position on the grid and a velocity, and on your turn you may only nudge that velocity by one square in any direction before the car draws its line. Nothing else in the game touches the car. That single rule means you are never steering the car itself — you are steering its momentum, three turns ahead of where the car actually is. Straights are for building speed you have already planned how to lose; corners are where everyone who didn't is busy hitting the wall. Leaving the track is a crash, and the price is honest physics rather than a penalty box: you stop dead where you were, your velocity zeroes, and the turn is spent — so what a crash really costs is every turn you invested building that momentum, plus the turns to build it again. A lap must pass three checkpoint bands in order (right side, bottom, left side), and a match is two heats with the starting player swapped, scored by the combined turn count across both — a structure that exists because of a measurement, not a preference: a single race hands whoever moves first an irreducible half-turn edge that our mirror tests put at 63–74%. Two heats with the start swapped give that edge to each player exactly once, and the mirror tests come back 48–50%.

🎯 How to Play

Every turn, the game draws nine faint circles: every place your car can be next, one for each way you can nudge the velocity (including not nudging it at all). Tap the circle you want — or aim with the arrow keys and press SPACE — and the car draws its pencil line there. A red circle means that move leaves the track: pick it and you crash, stopping dead with your velocity wiped. You may drive through the other car's cell but you may not end your move on it — the circle shows as blocked. The lap runs clockwise, and the three checkpoint bands (right, bottom, left) must be crossed in order before the chequered line will count you — the current one glows. A match is two heats: you start one, your opponent starts the other, and BOTH cars finish out every heat because the score is the total of your turn counts across the two. Lower combined total wins. If the totals tie, the tie goes to whoever crossed the line further past it; if that ties too, a sudden-death third heat settles it. A car that hasn't finished after 60 of its own turns records 60 and parks. Solo mode races a CPU at Easy, Normal or Hard — it picks from exactly the nine circles you would see.

💡 Tips & Strategy

• ▸Count your braking distance before you build speed. Acceleration is one square per turn, so a car moving 5 needs five turns of full braking to stop, travelling 4+3+2+1 = 10 squares on the way — if the wall ahead is closer than that little triangle of numbers, you are already committed to the crash and just haven't drawn it yet.
• ▸The nine circles are the whole game made visible. Before every move, glance at where the LEGAL circles will be next turn — a move that looks fast but leaves you with eight red circles and one survivable crawl was not fast, it was the crash arriving politely.
• ▸Speed is per-axis, so diagonals are almost free. Coming onto a straight, keep the old axis's speed while you build the new one — the corner exit where you carry 3 sideways and 2 forward beats the one where you stopped square and rebuilt from zero.
• ▸Enter corners wide and clip the apex on the way out. The inside wall punishes early turners; the classic Racetrack line swings out before the corner so the velocity arrow can sweep through the turn in two nudges instead of four.
• ▸A crash is not the end of the heat — it is a refund of nothing. You keep your position, so a deliberate crash-stop into a corner you badly misjudged can genuinely be the cheapest exit; the alternative is a worse crash two turns later at higher speed.
• ▸You may not end on your opponent's cell, and that rule is a weapon. Parking on the one braking square a corner really wants makes every one of their entry lines a little worse — soft blocking wins its half-turn quietly.
• ▸Race the clock, not the other car. Both cars finish out every heat and the match is your combined time, so a lost first heat by two turns is not a lost match — and crossing the line at full speed matters twice, because overshoot past the line is the first tiebreak.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions