48-hour game jam
Henko
A match-3 with a twist: matches don't score, they build arrows. You score by throwing a shuriken that ricochets off those arrows. Originally a 2011 game jam entry, rebuilt here for the browser.
Henko started as a 48-hour game jam entry in 2011. It takes the familiar match-3 loop and inverts the reward: making a match never scores points directly. Instead, every match spawns an arrow on the board. You score by hurling a shuriken across the grid, where it smashes tiles and gets redirected by the arrows you set up — chaining ricochets to multiply your score.
How it plays
- Matches build arrows, not score. Swap two adjacent tiles; the swap is only legal if it forms a line of three or more. The tile you swapped in becomes an arrow whose shape depends on the match: a 3-match makes a single random arrow, a 4-match a two-way arrow along the line, a 5-match a four-way arrow, and L/T shapes make two- and three-way arrows along their arms.
- The shuriken scores. Swipe it in a cardinal direction. It destroys every tile it crosses, and each arrow it hits redirects it and bumps the score multiplier. Multi-direction arrows pause the throw so you can swipe to pick the exit.
- Walls and risk. The shuriken stops when it hits a wall, breaking that segment into a gap. Throw it out through an existing gap and the run is over.
- Arrows swap freely. Two arrows can be swapped any time; an arrow only swaps with a tile when that tile lands a match.
About this rebuild
This is a from-scratch browser reconstruction of the original jam game, built as a self-contained engine with placeholder icons from the site's theme. The match detection, arrow classification, and shuriken pathing all run on a small pure game engine, with the board rendered as plain DOM so the tiles stay crisp and clickable. The number of symbols, grid size, scoring, and a couple of rule variants (auto-cascading matches, moving while paused) are all configurable.