Cher Ami

You are a homing pigeon of the Army Pigeon Service, carrying dispatches out of the line. Collect message capsules from the air and carry them home — threading the flight hole of a stone dovecote, or skimming the roof cages of a mobile loft built into a requisitioned London bus. Hold to climb; release into a long, slow glide.

**Every capsule is weight.** 

The climb weakens, the sink steepens — and the same bar that measures the load is what the flight is worth. An empty bird earns nothing. A full pouch pays treble. Ground covered while loaded is banked the moment you reach a loft, and lost with the bird if you go down. So the question is never really how to fly. It is whether to bank the message now, or push on for one more capsule with a heavier bird and more riding on it.  

**The line does not wait for you.**

• Mark IV tanks traverse a hand-cranked gun onto your lane and lay a shell into it
• Roland C.II scouts wearing the shark mouth German crews painted on their noses, decades before the Flying Tigers made it famous
• Army Zeppelins riding under the cloud deck, walking a pair of bombs up the sky
• Trained falcons — Germany's real answer to the pigeon post — that stoop on any bird loitering too long up high

**Grounded in the record.** 

The mobile lofts are the ones the British Army actually used: requisitioned London buses and motor lorries, sixty to seventy-five birds apiece, moved forward as the front moved. The bell that rings when you deliver is the bell wired to the loft entrance to call the pigeon master. The tanks shooting at you are the same machines that carried pigeons of their own, released through a port-hole in the hull because a tank could not carry a radio. Twenty historical notes are collected in the game, readable at any time.

Cher Ami was real. She carried the Lost Battalion's position out of the Argonne in October 1918, shot through and still flying, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

**Controls** 

— SPACE, or tap anywhere. Hold to climb, release to glide. Short taps for small corrections. That is the whole scheme.

Plays in the browser on desktop and on phones, in landscape. Personal bests are kept on your own device.

Everything on screen is drawn in code and every sound is synthesized as it plays — no images, no audio files, no network requests. One file, start to finish.

On AI: This game was built in collaboration with an AI assistant, which wrote the code, the graphics, the sound synthesis and the written text. There are no image, audio or font files in the project — every graphic is drawn with canvas commands and every sound is synthesized at runtime, so the "AI graphics" and "AI sounds" tags refer to code that draws and synthesizes, not to generated images or recordings. The design decisions, historical framing and corrections throughout were human-led.