How to play
Two fountain pens sit on a sheet of graph paper, facing each other. When the round starts they begin to move on their own, one square at a time, and every square they pass gets a line of ink. You only choose the direction. Run your pen into the edge of the sheet, into any line of ink (your own included) or into one of the black ink blots and you lose the round. The first player to win three rounds takes the match, so a match is best of five. You can also play best of three or best of nine.
- Two players, one keyboard. Blue steers with W A S D and hops with Space. Red steers with the arrow keys and hops with Enter (or Numpad 0).
- Gamepads work too: the left stick or the d-pad steers, A hops. The first pad is Blue, the second is Red.
- On a phone, hold it sideways. Each player owns one half of the screen: drag your thumb to steer and tap the ⤴ button to hop.
- Playing alone? Choose vs Bot and pick Easy, Normal or Hard.
- P or Esc pauses. The game also pauses when you switch tabs.
A pen can turn left or right but never straight back. If you press two directions quickly (left, then up), both turns are remembered and happen on the next two squares, which makes tight U-turns easy.
It gets faster
At the start a pen moves about nine squares a second. Every eight and a half seconds it speeds up a notch, until it moves more than twenty squares a second. Long rounds end in a scramble, so the room you saved early on is worth a lot.
If both pens crash on the same tick, including when they run into the same square, the round is a draw and nobody scores.
The hop
This is what makes Trail Duel different. Press the action button and your pen jumps over the next square and lands on the one after it. The square you jumped over stays blank, so your line of ink gets a gap. You start every round with one hop and can hold up to three.
A hop gets you through a wall of ink that would otherwise end the round. It can also break out of a pocket your rival has almost closed. You cannot hop off the sheet, and you cannot land on ink or on a blot.
Power-ups
Every five seconds a power-up may appear on the paper (at most two at once). It fades after twelve seconds. Drive the tip of your pen onto it to collect it; hopping over it does not count.
- Ink bottle: one more hop (up to three).
- Paper plane: a three-second dash. Your pen moves noticeably faster than your rival’s.
- Eraser: wipes every line of ink, yours and your rival’s, in a 7 × 7 patch around it. The pens themselves stay put.
Turn power-ups off on the menu for a pure duel.
Strategy
Count the room, not the distance. Before you turn into a corridor, ask how many squares are on the other side. A wide open area is safe for a while; a narrow pocket is a trap that closes slowly.
Cut across, then follow the wall. The strongest move is usually to slice the paper so that more of it is closer to you than to your rival. Once the two of you are in separate areas, the round is about who fills their area more neatly. Hug your own lines and do not leave single empty squares behind.
Save your hop. It is tempting to use it the moment you get it, but a hop held until the end is often the only way out of a sealed pocket.
Watch the eraser. Picking it up near your rival can open a hole in the wall they were relying on.
Practise against the bot. The Hard bot counts the free squares behind every turn, so it never walks into a smaller pocket by accident, and it hops only when it is cornered.
Want something with more weapons? Bounce Tanks is a two-player tank duel in a maze where every shell ricochets. For a race on the same keyboard, Turbo Twins puts two drifting cars on one track, and in Dash Duo two runners share an endless rooftop course.
If you enjoy Trail Duel, try Tug of War or Tunnel Twins next.
