STRAYWOOD

The kittens have wandered into the wood. Bring every one of them home.

At moonrise the kittens have strayed into the wood, and each one is waiting by a thicket or along the garden wall. You are the witch. Fly low over the wood floor on your broom, take kittens on board and bring them home to the cottage gate. The broom holds three, so a night is several trips, and every trip is flown the shortest way round the thickets.

The number at the top of the screen, FLOWN, is the night's flying so far, with the leg you are on beside it. Only the shortest way between your stops counts, so where you fly does not matter. Who rides together, and in which order you pick them up, is the whole puzzle. Fetching the nearest kitten again and again, and going home when the broom is full, leaves a far kitten out on her own and costs a whole trip to fetch her.

Every wood has a proved least flying

For every wood the game works out the least flying any night could give, trying every way of splitting the litter into trips of three and every order inside each trip. That is the PAR on screen. Match it for GOLD, come within two steps for SILVER and four for BRONZE. Anything more is LATE HOME, and the next wood waits until you do better.

Pass a wood and X shows the least night, every trip drawn as a loop from the gate. Miss it and you get one clue instead: the sizes of the best night's trips, and two kittens who never ride together in it, two who always do, a kitten in the wrong size of trip, or a trip flown in the wrong order. The rest is still yours to find.

Four hundred and thirty four kittens

Every kitten is drawn by the game from her own coat, ears, eyes, face and pose, and every one has a name. After each wood, HOME TONIGHT shows the portraits of the kittens you brought in, and the cat book keeps count of them all.

Play it in your browser first

The free edition on this page is ten woods. The $5.99 Windows download is forty, most of the later ones with eleven or twelve kittens, the cat book for all of them, and an ending.

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Controls. Arrows or WASD: hold to fly. Mouse or touch: hold a finger where you want to go and the witch flies there; tap the witch to act. Z over a waiting kitten takes her onto the broom; at the gate every rider hops off by herself. X for back and the least night (or a clue), P to pause, M to mute. On the wood screen, Left and Right change wood, Up opens the cat book and Down shows the rules; on a touchscreen, swipe in that direction.

Paid, from the same studio: PILOTAGE ($5.99), bring a fishing fleet home at dusk, every boat on a mooring of her own · MILLWRIGHT ($5.99), raise three windmills so every farm's cart has the shortest road · ANATOMIST ($4.99), a Game Boy cartridge where a monster's shape is its stat block · everything else at csaf.itch.io

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Every wood and every kitten is generated by the game's own code, and the least flying for each wood is computed by that same code. The browser edition's source is unminified.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text were made with generative AI assistance, and the cover illustration was generated with an image model. The music and sound effects are procedural synthesis from note data, not the output of a generative audio model.