Castle Cannons

Castle Cannons is a same-screen artillery duel staged like a shoebox puppet theatre. Everything on screen is cut from sugar paper: a sky built out of layered strips, clouds hanging on strings, a sun on a stick, a sea of scalloped waves, and two castles stacked out of paper blocks on green paper hills. Curtains hang at the sides of the stage. When a block is hit it creases, dog-ears and finally crumples, and the pieces flutter away as paper scraps.

Every castle is a real stack. Blocks rest on blocks, lose their footing and topple; stone takes three knocks, wood two, glass shatters at the first, and gold is heavy and worth the most when it goes over the edge. Somewhere inside sits a jointed paper king who wobbles on his pivots, gasps when the tower under him shakes and cheers when the other one comes down. Knock him off his perch or out of his keep and the round is yours. The wind changes between shots and the flag beside your cannon tells you which way, so the same shot never works twice. There are five things to load: a plain cannonball, a cluster that splits into three at the top of its climb, a bouncy ball that rebounds twice off the walls, a short-range wrecking ball, and a balloon bomb that drifts with the wind until something pops it.

Eight hand-built castle pairs come with the game, plus one the game cuts out fresh every time, and a build-your-own mode where the two players each stack a keep from a budget of paper before the first shot. Play two at one keyboard or one phone, or take on the computer at Easy, Normal or Sharp — Sharp solves the whole arc for the wind and aims at whatever is holding the king up. On a phone in portrait the stage folds down the middle: one castle at each end, a paper sea between them, and the top player's scoreboard turned upside down, so you can lay the handset flat on a table and sit facing each other.