How to play

Every drawer deals a random pile of parts: engines, fuel tanks, fins, a nose cone, and genuine junk (microwave, garden gnome, office chair). Click parts to stack them on the spine, bottom first.

The build panel tells the truth before you do anything: mass, thrust-to-weight, burn time, wobble, and which joint will fail first.

Launch. Wobble stresses the joints, weak joints shed parts at speed, and unreliable engines flame out when they feel like it.

Afterwards, launch the same rocket again, go back to the workshop and rearrange it, or demand a new junk drawer entirely.

Scoring

• Your score is peak altitude in metres — higher is better, and only the best flight matters.
• There's one all-time leaderboard. It does not record what the rocket was made of, which is a mercy.

Tips

• Thrust-to-weight under 1 means the rocket cannot lift itself. The game will let you launch it anyway, because watching is free.
• Fins mounted low do more stabilising than fins mounted high, and wobble is what tears rockets apart at speed.
• Duct tape couplers are weightless and hold like a handshake. Put the I-beam between anything you'd like to keep attached.

Frequently asked questions

Why did my rocket explode at Mach 2?

Read the caption — the game names the culprit. Usually a joint that was never rated for this, which on this launchpad is all of them.

Is there a best rocket?

Each drawer is random, so no recipe survives. High thrust, enough fins, and nothing wobbly near the top is as close as physics gets to advice here.

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