Tiny Yurts

Tiny Yurts is upfront about its influence in its own README: it's a Mini Motorways-style routing puzzle, built for js13kGames 2023, with the whole thing — a full simulation, procedural map generation, three animal types and an SVG rendering pipeline with no canvas anywhere — packed under 13,312 bytes. The pitch is not new. What makes it worth a slot on a shelf built specifically around whether a browser game survives contact with a thumb is that it was built touch-first where it counts, in a way most of the other js13k candidates that came through this queue were not.

Dragging paths, and losing farms

The loop is simple to state and genuinely tense to play: yurts house settlers, farms need settlers to work them, and every farm has an "issue" meter that climbs as its animals' demand goes unmet. Drag a path between a yurt and a farm — one grid cell at a time, extending as you keep dragging — and settlers start walking the route automatically. Ignore a farm too long and its issue meter fills, the farm is lost in a small, well-animated zoom-and-tilt sequence, and the run ends. Score is settlers (worth two points each) plus animals, tracked against a local high score. Reading farm.js and the README's own "tips and tricks" section together confirms this has real mechanical depth for something this small: a farm's demand scales with animal type, animal count and a difficulty curve that ramps over in-game months (shown on a small clock icon), and diagonal paths cover more distance per tile at the cost of longer travel time for the settlers using them. Three animal types — goats, oxen and fish, the last needing a path built out to stepping stones since paths can't cross open water — give the routing puzzle some actual variety instead of being one mechanic reskinned three times.

The part that matters for this shelf: it's actually built for touch

Where most candidates in this queue either ignore touch entirely or handle it as an afterthought, Tiny Yurts' pointer.js drives its dragging through the unified Pointer Events API — pointerdown, pointermove, pointerup — rather than separate mouse and touch handlers. That matters because Pointer Events are specified to behave identically regardless of whether a mouse or a finger produced them, which is the correct way to build this and not something most jam entries bother doing. The layout backs it up: the page carries a proper viewport meta tag and fills a 390x844 simulated phone screen edge to edge, with the menu, HUD icons and game board all rendered at full size rather than letterboxed into a strip — a real problem seen elsewhere in this review queue.

The detail that mattered most to check directly was the delete action. Every Mini Motorways-style game needs a way to remove a bad path, and the desktop-native way to do that is right-click — an input touchscreens don't have. Reading grid-toggle.js shows a Delete: RMB button wired to a genuine click handler that flips a gridRedState.locked flag; pointer.js checks that flag on every pointerdown and routes an ordinary primary-pointer drag into delete mode when it's set. Tested directly with a real emulated touchscreen tap rather than assumed from the code: tapping that button changed its label to Delete: On, and subsequent drags removed paths instead of placing them. That's a genuine, working touch equivalent for the one action this genre usually gets away with locking to a mouse.

One caveat is worth naming honestly rather than smoothing over. A sustained, multi-step drag driven through Chromium's raw touch-injection pipeline (CDP Input.dispatchTouchEvent, sending a touchStart, several touchMove steps and a touchEnd) reliably produced a pointercancel after only one or two move events in this shelf's own test harness, regardless of timing or touch identifiers. That sounds damning until it's compared against three other results: the identical drag driven through mouse-emulated pointer events completed perfectly, with 24 clean pointermove events and a proper release; a real discrete touch tap worked flawlessly on both the Start button and the Delete toggle; and touch-action: none is correctly set on the interactive layer, ruling out the browser's own scroll-gesture cancellation as the cause. Taken together, that points at a Chromium headless synthetic multi-touch limitation rather than a defect in the game — but a fully clean, end-to-end sustained touch drag could not be captured directly in this testing environment, so it's recorded here rather than asserted away.

Not much reason to stay

There's exactly one mode: an endless, procedurally generated map, scored and chased against a local best. That's an honest, appropriately-scoped choice for a 13kb jam game, and the difficulty curve gives early sessions real shape. But there's no campaign, no unlockable content and no second system to learn once the first run's shape has been seen — a handful of sessions is probably the natural lifespan for most players, which is fine for a five-minute browser diversion and a real limit on how often anyone will come back.

GitHub currently shows 59 stars and 16 forks for the source repository, solid numbers for a solo js13k entry, and the competition's own listing places it in the middle of the 2023 Mobile category's rankings — consistent with a game that clearly tried to get touch right rather than one that stumbled into working by accident.

Verdict

Tiny Yurts doesn't bring a new idea to the table, and it shouldn't be recommended on the strength of its concept. What it does well enough to earn its place here is the harder, less visible work: building its core interaction on the API that actually supports both mouse and touch, giving a mouse-only convention a real tap-based equivalent instead of quietly dropping it, and filling a phone screen properly instead of leaving most of it black. That's a real demonstration of what this shelf is asking every candidate to do, even if the game wrapped around it is a modest, openly derivative five-minute diversion rather than something with lasting pull.