Burrow Alert

Nine holes, four things that pop out of them, and about half a second to tell which is which.

Date: 2026-09-24 Genre: whack-a-mole Platform: Mobile (portrait, touch-first) Status: Playable build

Concept

You're guarding a 3x3 patch of garden. Weeds and the odd gold star pop out of the dirt and need a tap before they duck back down. Flowers pop out too, and so does a skunk once things get going — tap either of those by mistake and you lose a life. The game isn't really about reaction speed; it's about reading a shape you've only got a third of a second to look at.

How to play

Tap a hole the moment a weed (🌿) or a gold star (⭐) rises out of it. Leave flowers (🌸) alone, and whatever you do, don't touch the skunk (🦨) once it shows up. Three lives, a shrinking window per creature, and eventually up to three holes going at once. On desktop, click does the same thing as a tap, and the number keys 1-9 hit the holes in reading order if you'd rather test it from a keyboard. R restarts after a loss.

Core mechanics

• One grid, nine holes, one verb: tap the hole while something's up.
• A visible countdown ring on each active hole shows exactly how long you've got — no guessing.
• A combo multiplier builds on clean hits and craters to x1 the moment you whiff a weed, let one time out, or touch the wrong critter.
• Gold stars pay out 5x a plain weed but only stay up a little over half as long, so grabbing one is a real bet against your own reflexes.
• Letting a weed or star time out costs you the combo but not a life — the actual risk is reaching for a shape you're not sure about.

Progression & scoring

Score is weeds and stars times whatever your combo multiplier currently is, and the multiplier only climbs if you keep stringing clean hits together. Every 20 to 45 seconds the game adds pressure along a different axis rather than just speeding everything up: first more holes go active at once, then the windows get tighter, then gold stars and the skunk get folded into the mix. By the ninety-second mark you're reading three overlapping pop-ups with under a second on each. Best score is saved locally, so the number chasing you is your own.

Look & feel

A cartoon garden — blue sky fading into grass, dirt mounds for each hole — sits inside an on-screen phone frame so it reads as a phone game even before you touch it. Hits throw off a quick burst of colored particles that match the creature (green for weeds, gold for stars), and getting caught by a bad tap kicks off a short screen shake and a color flash: soft pink for a flower, harder red for the skunk. Every sound is a synthesized WebAudio blip — a rising chirp for a good hit, a low sawtooth buzz for a bad one — so there's no audio file anywhere in the build.

What makes it fun

• The tension isn't "can I tap fast enough," it's "was that actually a weed" — you're pattern-matching under a deadline, not just reacting to a timer.
• Gold stars turn every combo streak into a live bet: grab the short-window bonus and keep your multiplier alive, or play it safe and watch the multiplier reset anyway once you get greedy on a duller mole.
• Losing to a wrong tap always has an answer — you can point at the exact hole and the exact half-second you misread it, which is what makes the retry feel earned instead of random.