THE APPARATUS
A free browser skill game. Honest physics, a shared daily board, and an observer that takes notes on you. Everything below is free to use.
The pitch
A forty-three-year-old machine in a dark room was ordered decommissioned in 1983. Someone overruled the order. It has been running ever since, alone, narrating each evaluation to no one — until you sit down at it. You work two independent motors to tilt a steel bar and roll a ball up a board full of holes to the one lit target, without losing it to the others. The physics does not forgive, and it does not pretend to. An observer watches every run and writes clinical notes about how you play. Every day, every player gets the exact same board.
Fact sheet
- Title
- THE APPARATUS (on-screen) · Protocol 7-C (the brand / URL)
- Genre
- Arcade skill / one-more-run, with a daily challenge
- Platform
- Web — any desktop or mobile browser. No install, no account.
- Price
- Free. No ads, no purchases.
- Play at
- protocol7c.com
- Under the hood
- A single HTML file, HTML5 canvas, zero dependencies, no build step. The daily leaderboard runs on Cloudflare Workers + D1.
- Lineage
- Inspired by the 1983 arcade cabinet Ice Cold Beer — not a clone.
Features
- Honest physics. Two motors with real spin-up lag, stall, and a hidden per-run mismatch. Six exploits were found during development and every one was patched. The frustration is the design.
- The observer. A narrator that reacts to how you play across five difficulty bands — 95+ authored lines plus lines triggered by specific mechanics. It is not a language model; it is written.
- The Daily Docket. One seeded board a day, the same for everyone, with a shared leaderboard and streaks. A CCTV "share card" stamps your result.
- Deaths are content. The report card replays the final six seconds of your run as a looping CCTV exhibit.
- A file that persists. Evidence and incident reports accumulate across runs — fragments of a story with three questions it never answers.
- Accessible. A "stabilized feed" mode reduces flashing, strobing, and shake, and turns on automatically for players who prefer reduced motion.
Screenshots
Full-resolution PNGs: title · play · report · key art
Read more
The complete fiction lives in the Facility Dossier; the mechanics are documented in the Operator's Manual; the standings are kept in The Permanent Record.