SHUTTLEDECK

The elevator pitch on SHUTTLEDECK's own GitHub page is "infinite-runners merged with deck-builders," and for once that's exactly what shipped. You're a space courier hauling cargo — a Xenotransponder, in the opening job — across a string of planets, and the screen is a three-lane strip (red on top, green in the middle, blue on the bottom) that scrolls toward you full of asteroids, hazards and collectible minerals. You never touch the ship directly. Instead you hold a hand of cards, drawn from a small deck, and tapping or clicking one spends energy to do something: Rho Channel snaps you into the red lane, Gamma Sector the green, Beta Stream the blue, while other cards fire missiles, throw up a shield, or drop a screen-clearing "Tactical Nuke" if you've drawn one. It's a neat reframe of a genre that's usually just "press left, press right," and reading the cards.js source confirms the trick holds up mechanically: sixteen distinct card definitions, covering three colour-locked lane shifts, five-plus weapon and utility types, and permanent run-scoped "Blessing" upgrades that raise your energy cap, shield cap or hand size.

Controls: the registry lead that didn't survive testing

This listing arrived with a note that the discovery pass had entered it as a rare "mobile-only" js13k submission, on the theory that its category entry meant the author never built a real desktop scheme. That's the kind of claim this process exists to check rather than repeat, and it doesn't hold up. Reading input.js shows the game explicitly listens for both touchstart and mousedown, routing both into the same tap event; testing confirmed this directly by driving the identical Rho Channel card with a real emulated touchscreen tap on a 390-wide phone and a real mouse click on a 1280-wide desktop, and getting the identical result both times — one energy spent, the ship moved into the red lane, one card discarded from the hand. Nothing about the touch experience is a compromise version of the desktop one; it's the same interaction end to end.

The one legitimate critique of the control scheme comes from js13k's own 2021 judging pool rather than from testing here: judge Ahmed Khalifa suggested the cards would be easier to parse with a directional arrow rather than relying on colour alone to signal which lane a card sends you to. That's a reasonable accessibility point — colour is the only cue on offer — even though it never caused a misread during testing, where colour-matching the card border to the lane's edge strip was immediate and obvious.

A short, well-told run rather than an endless climb

The game frames itself as a delivery job with a destination, not a high-score treadmill, and that shows in how it's built: persist.js resets your deck, energy cap, shield cap and mineral count back to defaults on every new attempt, and the "Blessing" cards that raise those caps only matter for the run you're currently on. According to the game's own description, gold collected along the way gets spent at stops between planets on new ability cards, giving each run a light deck-building arc even though nothing about your progress carries over once it ends. That's a reasonable trade for a competition entry with a hard size budget, but it does mean the replayability here is closer to "a good arcade run you might come back to" than "a game with a long tail," and js13k's judges placed it a solid but not chart-topping 11th out of 100 entries that year.

Presentation

The visual language is confident minimalism: flat vector ship and card glyphs, a scrolling starfield, and planet portraits rendered as simple geometric faces that still manage real character (Professor Zorn's green-tinted spectacles are doing a lot of work for a shape built out of circles and rectangles). The HUD keeps shield, minerals, hand size and energy all visible at once without crowding the lane strip above it, on both the phone and desktop layouts tested.

Final verdict

SHUTTLEDECK earns its js13k placement honestly: a genuinely different control idea for an overfamiliar genre, executed with enough card variety and narrative framing to justify the mechanic rather than just showing it off once. The registry's doubt about desktop support turned out to be exactly the kind of unverified claim this process is built to catch, and correcting it matters — this plays just as well with a mouse as a thumb. What holds it at 8.0 rather than higher is scope: it's a short, self-contained run with no long-term progression and only colour, not shape, distinguishing its lane cards. Neither is a real flaw so much as the honest size of what a 13-kilobyte budget can hold, and what it holds is genuinely worth the ten minutes it takes to play.