Spinning Top Arena
Two-player online spinning top battles in your browser
Tap the image to open the tool ↗Nothing to install and nothing to download. Sign in, pick a top, drop into an arena and take on someone online. The twist is in the format: you aim once, you launch once, and your settings decide the match. After the launch you cannot touch anything. Both players watch the physics engine play the whole thing out, collisions, knockouts, ring outs and special moves included.
How a match works
The flow of a battle is simple:
- Get into a room: join a friend with a room code, hit quick match for a random opponent, or open a public room and wait. If you just want a few rounds now, play the built-in bot.
- Set up your top: choose one of the three tops in your line-up and decide whether to equip a special move.
- Aim and launch: drag on the arena to set the landing spot, the direction and the power, then let go. Both players launch separately and neither can see the other's settings.
- Watch the replay: once both launches are in, the server resolves the whole round and both sides watch exactly the same replay.
- Score: each round that produces a winner scores a point, and the first player to three points takes the match.
More power is not automatically better. Come in too hot and you slide out of the ring yourself, come in too soft and you never bite into your opponent. Finding the angle and the power that sit right in between is the part of this game you keep thinking about.
What makes it interesting
- Two resources, four ways to lose: every top has a stamina bar for its spin and a durability bar for its health. You can be burst, spun down to a stop, knocked out of the ring, or beaten on health when time runs out. Each ending rewards a completely different plan.
- Four types that counter each other: attack, defence, stamina and balance are tuned into a deliberate triangle, where attack beats stamina, stamina beats defence, and defence beats attack. There is no strongest type, only matchups.
- Ten tops with their own character: each has an over the top name and its own attack, defence, stamina and weight, plus critical rate and special move strength, so two tops of the same type still feel different in your hands.
- Five special moves: a charging dash, an impact hit, a high speed move that also restores health, a vortex, and a clone. You equip one, it fires on a chance, and it keeps matches unpredictable.
- Several arenas: the molten core arena, the curved wall arena and the round arena each have their own terrain, and the same line-up can go from winning to losing just by changing venue.
Going deeper
I built this game from end to end, and there are two full write ups about it. Both are in Traditional Chinese:
- Every mechanic in detail, stats, type matchups, special moves and scoring: the full gameplay breakdown
- How it is built and how it stays free to run: the technical architecture
Questions people ask
Do I need to install anything? No. It runs in the browser on a phone or a computer. You sign in with a Google account so your settings and match record are kept.
What if there is nobody to play against? Play the built-in practice bot whenever you like. Bot matches do not count towards your record, they are purely for practice.
Can I steer the top during the battle? No, and that is the core of the design. You only decide how the top goes out, and the physics engine takes it from there. It is also why both players see identical screens and why the match cannot be manipulated.
Does it cost anything? It is completely free. The whole online battle system runs inside Cloudflare's free tier, and the write up on the technical architecture explains how.
When you are done playing, take a look at the other tools: Kaomoji, QR Code Studio, Compound Interest Calculator, or go back to all tools.