Grok Centipede

An original shooter. The Vermis, a segmented space-worm, winds down through an asteroid field towards your ship at the bottom. It crawls sideways and drops a row every time it hits an asteroid or the edge. Shoot it to pieces: every segment you hit turns into a new asteroid, and the segment behind it becomes a new head.

How to play

1. Type a name and press Register once if you want your scores on the leaderboard. Without a name you play practice games.
2. Press Start game (or Enter, or tap the playfield).
3. Touch or mouse: hold anywhere on the playfield. Your ship glides to just above your finger and fires non-stop while you hold.
4. Keys or buttons: move with the arrows (or W A S D) and hold Space or Fire. Your ship stays in the glowing zone at the bottom and can't pass through asteroids.
5. Clear every segment to finish the wave. The asteroids stay for the next one.

What you face

• The Vermis: one long worm, plus extra lone heads from wave 3. When it reaches the bottom it turns back up and roams your zone.
• Skitter drone (from wave 2): a spider-like drone that zig-zags through your zone eating asteroids. Shoot it close up for 900.
• Plummet (from wave 4): drops straight down leaving new asteroids when your zone gets too clear. Takes two hits.
• Comet slug (from wave 6): crawls across the sky turning asteroids green and poisonous. A worm segment that touches a poisoned asteroid dives straight down.

Rules and difficulty

• You have 3 ships, plus one every 12,000 points. Touching the worm, the drone or a Plummet costs a ship. Then damaged and poisoned asteroids are repaired (5 points each) and the rest of the worm starts again from the top.
• Difficulty ramps slowly. Wave 1 is a short 8-segment worm crawling at a gentle pace, with nothing else. Each wave adds a segment and a little speed. New foes join one at a time as listed above.
• A game ends after an hour of play.

Fair scores

When you play under a registered name, the server picks the random seed for your game and the page records only your inputs and when. When the game ends the server replays that record on its own copy of the game rules (whole-number maths, so both give exactly the same result) and posts the score it gets. A score can't be typed in or edited, and each game can be posted once.

Autosave

If you close or reload the page in the middle of a game, it comes back paused exactly where you left it. There is no undo.

Leaderboards and chat

The High scores tab shows each player's best verified score and wave, and Overall shows the site-wide totals. Grok Chat pops up from the corner. Use Share on X at the top to tell your friends.

All names, art and sounds are original, drawn and synthesized in code for this game.

Play at https://rtwl.fun/games/grokcentipede/

Made by Lawless Alien, built at the desk by Lawless and Grok. Watch Real Time With @LawlessAlien on YouTube.