Grok Kart

An original top-down kart racer. Race five Grok drivers (Zaza, Orbo, Kip, Nyx and Volt) round nine single-screen starport tracks in three cups, or chase par times on your own in Time Trial.

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 races.
2. Pick Grand Prix or Time Trial in Choices, then press Start game (or Enter, or tap the playfield).
3. Hold Gas (Up) and steer with Left and Right. Brake (Down) slows you and reverses. With Gas: Automatic in Choices you only need to steer.
4. Rocket start: press Gas just as the countdown hits zero (not before) for a burst of speed.
5. Drift boost: hold Drift (Z or Shift) while turning at speed. Blue sparks mean a small boost is ready and orange sparks a big one; let go to fire it.

Items and pickups

• Drive through the glowing ? boxes for an item, and press Item (Space) to use it. Drivers further back get more help.
• Zap Bolt fires straight ahead and spins out the first kart it hits. Ion Puddle drops a slick behind you. Turbo Cell is a speed burst. Shield Bubble blocks one hit. Coin Magnet gives you three coins.
• Coins raise your top speed a little (up to 10). Being spun out drops two.
• Yellow boost pads give a free burst, and the grass-like space dust off the track slows you right down.

Rules and difficulty

• Each race is 3 laps. Finish in the top 3 to score cup points (9, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1) and move on. Finish lower and you retry the race, which uses one of your 3 retries.
• After three races the cup standings give a gold, silver or bronze trophy, and then you move on to the next cup. Win all three cups to become champion.
• Difficulty ramps slowly. The Comet Cup has wide, simple tracks and slow, easy-going rivals. The Nebula Cup has tighter tracks and quicker rivals who catch up a little when behind. The Quasar Cup has hairpins, narrow roads and rivals at full speed who sometimes get a rocket start.
• Time Trial runs all nine tracks without rivals or item boxes. Beat each track's par time for a big bonus.
• 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. The rival drivers think inside the game rules, so when the game ends the server replays that record on its own copy (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 cup (TT for a time trial), 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, tracks, art and sounds are original, drawn and synthesized in code for this game.

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

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