Light Cycles

How to Play

• Cycles move forward on their own and can only turn 90 degrees; you can't reverse.
• Hitting the arena wall or any light trail, including your own, crashes your cycle and loses the round.
• If both cycles crash at the same moment, the round is a draw and nobody scores.
• The pace picks up during each round. The first player to win three rounds wins the match.

Strategy and Tips

• Stay out of dead ends. Before turning into a corridor, check it's bigger than the space your opponent has.
• Cutting in front of your opponent is the main attack: it walls off the space ahead of them.
• Hug your own trail when space runs low. A tight spiral keeps you alive longest.
• Turns can be queued a moment early, so you can pull a quick double turn into a gap.

Controls

Player 1 turns with W, A, S and D; player 2 with the arrow keys. Each key points the cycle in that direction. Playing alone, use either set. On a touch screen, tap the left side of your area to turn left and the right side to turn right; with two players, each uses their own half.

Background

The light-cycle duel comes from the 1982 film Tron and the arcade game based on it, and it inspired countless snake-style two-player games. It's easy to learn, and the space shrinks every second, so each round gets tense quickly.