Archery — a free bow and arrow game in your browser

Ten arrows at a ten-ring target. Drag back from the bow: the direction sets the angle, the length sets the draw. Let go and the arrow flies, dropping the whole way. Hit the gold in the middle for 10 and the outermost ring for 1.

The one thing standing between you and a perfect hundred is the wind, which is drawn across the range and gets stronger with every arrow. Free, no download, no sign-up.

How to play

• Drag from the archer to set your elevation, then release. Every arrow leaves the bow at the same speed, so the angle is the whole shot.
• The vertical arrows over the range are the gust, and they show which way it is pulling and how hard. It is redrawn before every shot.
• Score is 10 in the gold down to 1 in the outer ring, and a complete miss is 0.
• On a desktop the up and down arrow keys adjust the elevation and space looses.
• Your score is the total of ten arrows, out of a possible 100, and your top 5 is kept on this device.

A gust is just a change in gravity, and gravity has all day

The arrow leaves the bow at the same speed every time, so there is exactly one thing to get right: how high you aim. What makes that hard is the gust, which pulls the arrow up or down for the whole flight.

The useful way to think about it is that a downdraft is simply extra gravity. Every arrow leaves at the same speed, so every arrow is in the air for the same length of time — the gust does not change when the arrow arrives, only where. And the drop it adds over that fixed flight goes with the square of the time, which is why a gust that looks like a mild breeze moves the landing point by the better part of the target face.

So the rule is simple and it is the opposite of what people guess: aim high into a downdraft and low into an updraft. You are not fighting the gust sideways, you are pre-paying for the drop it is going to add.

This is also why an along-the-range wind is not what this game uses, and the reason is worth stating because it is a genuine design constraint rather than a preference. A headwind in a side view does not push the arrow off line, it slows it down. Measured across the whole range of strengths: weak enough for the arrow to reach the target and the wind made no difference at all, strong enough to matter and the strongest headwind made the gold unreachable at every angle. A disturbance you cannot correct for is not difficulty, it is a coin flip, so it was replaced with one you can.

Two practical notes. The gust is drawn before you aim, so you always have the information; missing is a reading error, not bad luck. And the release carries a small amount of scatter, because a bow held by a person does not send two arrows to exactly the same place — it is small enough that a well-read shot is still a gold, and large enough that ten perfect shots in a row is not a thing you can grind out.

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