Tiltanic

Tiltanic is a small arcade game played in the browser at tiltanic.com with no sign-up, and also sold as an Android app on Google Play. The sea behaves like water in a tank. Tilting the phone pushes the water, and the boat rides whatever wave you make. Tilt the left edge down and the boat rises, tilt the right edge down and it sinks. On a computer the mouse, the arrow keys or A and D do the same, and a QR code beside the game opens the course on your phone.

The boat sails forward on its own and gates come toward it. Most gates have an anchor hanging from above and a sea mine floating up from below, and you steer through the gap. Each gate passed is a point, and a run ends the moment the boat touches either one. The gates narrow and close in until gate 40, and the sea itself changes as your score climbs, from the first change at 5 gates to a lava sea at 10 and the inside of a whale at 20.

The daily part is the course. Every date has its own sequence of gates, shared by everyone who plays that day, starting at midnight on your own clock. There are no lives and no timer. You can retry as often as you like, and your best run goes on today's leaderboard of the top 10 captains, where the server replays each run to check it. One finished try a day builds a streak, with a shield that covers a missed day after three in a row.

What sets it apart from other one-button daily runs is the water. Every push you make comes back as a wave a second or two later, so the game rewards small, early moves over quick fixes. New players get a gentler warm-up sea with dots showing where the boat will ride, and warm-up runs stay off the leaderboard. You can send a dare link so a friend races a ghost of your best run, and friends who play your dares form a crew with its own board.

The game is free and plays in English and seventeen other language versions, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic. The web version shows no ads. The Android app carries ads, and an optional pirate pack adds outfits and removes them. Around Halloween the sky turns purple and a pumpkin with bats floats over the sea. It suits anyone who wants a quick daily skill game on the phone that takes a minute a try.