BattlePens

Before phones, there was the back page of an exercise book. The equipment list was short: one biro, one sheet of paper, one friend, and a teacher facing the board. You ruled a coastline at each end, drew a few islands down the middle so it wasn't too easy, and gave yourselves three ships each. Then you stood the pen on its nib, held it steady, and flicked it. Whatever line the pen left was your go. That was the entire game. If the line went through one of theirs, that one was finished. If it went nowhere at all, that was still your go, thank you very much, and no you cannot have another. BattlePens is that game, with the paper included. HOW IT WORKS Put a finger on one of your vehicles and keep it there. The pen is loading — you can see the ink pooling underneath it. Then flick your finger a short way, and the pen shoots off in the opposite direction, exactly as it did on the desk. Let go too soon and it dribbles about a centimetre and achieves nothing. Hold on too long and the nib digs into the paper and sulks. Somewhere in the middle is a proper flick, and finding it is most of the game. Touch the gun on the nose and you fire. Touch anywhere else on the vehicle and you move, backwards included. That is the whole control scheme. There is no menu for it, because there was never a menu for it on paper either. THREE VERSIONS OF THE SAME ARGUMENT • Sea — ships picking their way between islands • Land — tanks between the copes • Air — Spitfires, open sky, absolutely nowhere to hide Same rules throughout. The islands are cover, so the better you get at beating the computer, the more of them it quietly takes away. THINGS THAT ARE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE The pen curves. It always curved. It will curve at the worst possible moment and you will blame the phone, and people have been blaming something else since roughly 1974. Every line you draw stays on the page. Nothing fades, nothing is tidied up. By the end of a close game the sheet is in a genuine state, and you can read the whole battle back off it like a very silly map. The one that gets everybody: your own line can never hurt you, but driving straight through the other side counts as a kill. Ramming is legal. It always was. WHO YOU PLAY The computer, if nobody is about. It flicks with the same wonky pen you do — same spread, same curve, same humiliating misfires — so when it misses, it really did miss. Or pass the phone across the desk and play an actual person, which is how it was meant to be done. WHAT IT COSTS Nothing. All three games, both players, no adverts, no in-app purchases, no premium ships, nothing to unlock, no energy timer, no daily reward for logging in. There is a button that lets you buy the developer a coffee. It buys you precisely nothing in the game, which is rather the point. Don't get caught playing. :D