Hen House Dash – free retro LCD egg-catching game

How to play

1. Pick a mode. Press GAME A (easier) or GAME B (faster) on the device, or press 1 or 2.
2. Watch the hens. When a hen lays an egg it appears at the start of her chute and rolls one step at a time toward the end. Every egg needs five steps before it drops off the end of its chute.
3. Move the basket. The robot can stand in four places: top-left, bottom-left, top-right and bottom-right. Each place lines up with exactly one chute. Be in the matching corner when the egg drops.
4. Do not miss three. A caught egg scores a point. A missed egg cracks on the floor and a chick pops out, the game freezes for a moment, and the miss counter in the top-left corner goes up. The third miss ends the game.

Controls

The game keeps the keyboard to itself only while the device is on screen, so the arrow keys and space bar scroll this page normally once you have scrolled down to read it. If you switch tabs or scroll away during a game, it pauses automatically.

On a phone held upright, the four round buttons sit under the screen so both thumbs can reach them. Turn the phone sideways and the layout changes to the classic handheld arrangement with two buttons on each side of the screen. Several fingers can press at once, and you can slide a thumb from one button to another.

The rules in detail

Eggs and chutes

Each hen has her own chute. The two left hens feed the top-left and bottom-left corners, the two right hens feed the top-right and bottom-right corners. An egg moves one step at a time, as on a real LCD where each position is a fixed segment. It occupies five positions along the chute and then drops into the basket position at the end. The game checks where the robot is at the instant the egg drops.

Catching

If the robot is in the matching corner, the egg lands in the basket, you hear a bright double beep and the score goes up by one. There is no partial credit: standing in the wrong corner by even a fraction of a step is a miss.

Missing

A missed egg falls to the floor on that side of the screen. A cracked shell with a chick appears and blinks, a low buzzer sounds and the game freezes for about a second so you can see what happened and get your bearings. The miss counter in the top-left corner lights one more cracked egg. When all three are lit the game is over.

Speed and spacing

The game gets faster as you score. Every 20 points the time between steps shrinks by 8 percent, until it reaches a floor value (see the table below). A new egg is never laid in the same step as another, and eggs are always spaced out enough that you have time to move between corners, but at high speed that time gets very short.

Bonus

Every time your score reaches a multiple of 100, the miss counter is wiped clean and a short jingle plays. A long run therefore depends on how well you recover, not on never making a mistake.

Game A and Game B

Each mode keeps its own best score on your device. The best scores are shown on this page above the guide and are updated as soon as a game finishes.

Scoring

• 1 point for every egg you catch, shown on a four-digit seven-segment display.
• Miss counter reset every time you reach 100, 200, 300 and so on.
• Speed-up every 20 points, so reaching 100 points means five speed-ups have already happened.
• New best message when you beat the saved score for the mode you played.

Tips for a higher score

• Read the egg at the last step. Eggs on the far end of a chute are about to drop. Decide where to go when the egg reaches the last chute position, not before.
• Stay central in your mind. Think of the four corners as a square. Any corner is at most one move away on each axis, so use the arrow keys for quick one-axis hops and the corner keys for long jumps.
• Do not chase eggs that are too far off. If two eggs are going to arrive close together on opposite corners, it is better to take the first cleanly than to blur between them.
• Go for the big numbers. Some milestone scores unlock hidden surprises. Nobody has seen all three without a long, clean run.
• Use the freeze. After a miss the game stops for a moment. Use it to put the robot where the next egg is heading.
• Learn the rhythm in Game A. The step time is constant between speed-ups, so tapping in time with the ticking sound becomes natural.
• Play with sound on. The tick of each step is your metronome.
• Aim for the hundred-point reset. If you have two misses, push to the next multiple of 100 and your counter returns to zero.

A short history of LCD catch games

Pocket-sized liquid-crystal games became a craze in the early 1980s. Nintendo's Game & Watch line, which began in 1980, put a single game on a calculator-style device, and one of its best-known layouts had a character moving a container between a few fixed positions to catch things that fell or rolled toward it. Because an LCD can only show shapes that were etched into the glass in advance, every game of this type is built from a handful of on-or-off pictures: a character in one of a few poses, objects in a handful of positions and a few digits.

The idea spread worldwide. Factories in the Soviet Union produced their own electronic handheld games in the mid-1980s, many of them catch games with local themes, and clones and homages appeared in many other countries. Kids traded them at school, compared high scores and swapped rumours about secret rewards. The simple rule of being in the right place at the right time turned out to be a durable game design.

Hen House Dash is an original game in that tradition, with its own robot, its own hens and its own handheld design. If you grew up with a game like this, you will recognise the four-corner layout. If you did not, it is a quick way to see what held a whole generation's attention on long bus rides.

About this game

Hen House Dash is drawn entirely with plain HTML5 canvas. The LCD screen draws every possible segment in a faint ghost tone and lights the active ones in dark ink, like a real liquid-crystal display; the digits are seven-segment numerals. All sound is synthesized on the fly with the Web Audio API, so the page loads no external images, fonts or audio files for the game itself. It starts quickly, uses very little battery and works offline once loaded.

The game logic runs on a fixed step clock, like the original hardware: eggs move one position per step, and the step time shortens as you progress. The drawing code scales the whole device to fit your window and chooses between a landscape and a portrait layout, so the same page works on a wide monitor, an upright phone and a sideways phone.

Your best scores and sound setting are kept in your browser's local storage on your device only. The game has no accounts, no leaderboard server and no tracking of its own.

Frequently asked questions