Grok Paperboy

An original paper-route arcade game. You are Grok, the delivery rider for the Starport Daily Grok. Ride your hover-bike down Orbit Lane for a whole week, Monday to Sunday, and keep your subscribers happy.

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 rides.
2. Press Start game (or Enter, or tap the playfield). Each day opens with the front page: the headline and a map of who subscribes.
3. The bike rides on by itself. Left and Right steer, Faster speeds up and Brake slows down.
4. Throw tosses a paper to the left, towards the houses. The bright, coloured houses are subscribers: land a paper on the step (100), the porch (150) or right in the mailbox (250).
5. The dark houses are not subscribers. Their windows (100) and mailboxes (50) are fair game. Be careful: breaking a subscriber's window makes them cancel.
6. Hop lifts the hover-bike over things on the ground for a moment, then needs a short rest.

Trouble on the street

• Cargo crates and open hatches sit still. Steer round or hop over them.
• Coolant puddles make you skid sideways.
• Patrol drones float across the street. Hopping doesn't help, but a paper knocks them out (150).
• Sweeper bots trundle down the sidewalk, hover-cars race down the road lanes, robo-dogs dash out of yards and dust twisters zig-zag about. A paper knocks out bots, dogs and twisters too (100).
• A crash costs a bike. You start with 3.

The end of each day

• After the last house comes the Flight Academy training course. Hit the five targets on the left (200 each), ride over the ramps (100 each) and reach the finish line for a bonus of 500 per day of the week. A wipe-out on the course doesn't cost a bike, but you lose the bonus.
• Any subscriber who got no paper, or whose window you broke, cancels. Deliver to every subscriber without breaking anything for a perfect day: 1000 points, a spare bike (up to 5) and a new subscriber.
• Lose every subscriber and you're fired. Finish Sunday for a 5000 bonus plus 1000 for every bike left.

Extras

• Paper bundles on the street give 8 more papers (you carry up to 20 and start each day with 12).
• A Lucky Star sometimes appears from Tuesday on. It forgives your next crash.
• Deliveries in a row build a combo: 20 more per delivery, up to 200.
• Sunday edition: every delivery counts double.
• Hints (on by default) show an aim marker where a paper would hit the houses, and a green arrow over subscribers still waiting.
• Every day has a new headline in the Starport Daily Grok. You can skip the front page in Choices.

Difficulty

Monday is slow and gentle: a low top speed, only a few crates, puddles and drones, and a longer front page to get ready. Each day the bike is a little faster and there is a bit more trouble, in small steps: sweeper bots from Tuesday, open hatches from Wednesday, hover-cars from Thursday, robo-dogs from Friday (they start slow and give up the chase quickly, and get a little keener each day) and dust twisters on the weekend. 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 (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 the day reached, 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/grokpaperboy/

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