Pinch Points 🦀

A fast, kid-friendly crab-routing game for 1-6 players, built in Rust with Bevy. The tide is out: place arrows in the sand to route streams of crabs into your castle before the sea (and the gulls) take everything back.

Install

• One line, fetching the latest release for your machine:

  # Linux, macOS
  curl -fsSL https://agourlay.github.io/pinch-points/install.sh | sh
  # Windows (PowerShell)
  irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agourlay/pinch-points/master/site/install.ps1 | iex

• Prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows (x86_64 and arm64) are attached to each GitHub release. Unpack the archive and run pinch-points.
• From crates.io, with a Rust toolchain:

  cargo install --locked pinch-points

  --locked builds against the dependency versions this game was tested and released with.
• From source:

  git clone https://github.com/agourlay/pinch-points
  cd pinch-points
  cargo build --release && ./target/release/pinch-points

The last two need Bevy's Linux build dependencies (libudev-dev, libasound2-dev, libwayland-dev or X11 equivalents).

The game

Built on the skeleton of Sonic Team's ChuChu Rocket! (1999): creatures walk forward and turn at walls by a fixed rule, arrows are your only verb, and everyone places at once. What it does differently:

• Six players, not four, with team play that grows with the table.
• Every crab has a handedness, left-clawed or right, so one corridor can route two crabs to two destinations. Herding puzzles become sorting ones.
• The score is on the board: castles grow through four tiers as they bank.
• A gull raid costs half a castle and spills live crabs back onto the sand for everyone to scramble over.
• The tide is the clock. The last 30 seconds double the gull spawn rate; the wave stops everything where it stands.

Plus terrain and a crab bestiary the original never had, AI that walks a cursor to the tile the way you do, and rounds shareable as text codes, even one still in progress.

Modes

• Tide Pool: a 100-level solo puzzle campaign, every level proved solvable with the arrows it grants and unsolvable without them.
• Turf War: local versus for 2-6 on one keyboard plus gamepads, with team play, series, and AI at three levels.
• Beach Lobby: up to 6 over LAN, on deterministic lockstep with desync detection. Anyone past the sixth chair watches instead, and can talk to the table and vote on a tide event to call down on it.
• Driftwood: a level editor whose solver proves a level beatable before it ships.
• Beach Day, Replay, Daily Challenge, Achievements.

Controls

	Move	Place	Remove	Clear all
P1	WASD	arrow keys	Space	Shift
P2	IJKL	numpad 8/5/4/6	numpad 0	numpad Enter
any seat	gamepad d-pad/stick	face buttons	L1	R1

Pads are plug-and-play and fill seats from the highest player down, so keyboard-plus-pad, two pads and two keyboards all work with no setup. Every menu is navigable from a pad, and the interface speaks eight languages.

Documentation

• pinch-points on the web: the landing page, built from site/.
• docs/guide.md: the full guide. Rules, every mode in depth, all the controls and settings, LAN troubleshooting, and the development hooks.
• docs/pinch-points-spec.md: the design document.
• docs/backlog.md: remaining ideas.

Building

cargo run --release

Requires Rust (2024 edition) and the Linux dependencies above. The simulation is engine-free, integer-only and bit-reproducible, which is what lets lockstep netcode, replays and the solver share one implementation. See the guide for asset regeneration, determinism and tooling.

License

Apache-2.0.