A LOTUS POND
ON YOUR TABLE.
FULL OF DUCKS.
Duck Shooter drops a hand-built floating island onto any table — up to 1.2 metres of it. Walk around it, use your phone as the gun, and clear the sky in sixty seconds. Three shells. Bamboo in the way. A dog who decides when the birds go up.
PLACE. AIM. FIND YOUR LINE.
No thumbsticks and no fire button. The camera is the window, your feet are the controls, and a tap is the trigger.
Point at any table and tap. The island lands on it — lotus pond, bamboo, reeds, rocks — and stays put while you move. Ducks drop anywhere on it and sit there; the dog walks them down one at a time, and nothing goes up until he gets close.
The aim mark sits at the centre of your screen. Move the phone to put it on a duck, tap anywhere to fire. One tap, one shell — three of them, then 850 ms of reload you can feel.
Bamboo really blocks shots, and a flushed duck climbs straight up through it. Don't wait it out — get up and shoot from the other side of the table.
FIVE BIRDS. ONE YOU LEAVE ALONE.
The clock is rarely what ends a round. Every duck that clears the treeline costs a life, and three lost ends it there and then.
The bird the round is made of. One shell, one point.
Fast, and it comes for you rather than for the sky. Let it reach you and a faceful of feathers costs you 2.5 seconds of view.
Slow, and wearing enough feathers to eat five shells. At a shared table it pays whoever put the most into it.
A common duck in a gold coat, and faster for it. It pays no points — it hands back one of the three ducks you are allowed to lose. In versus, where there are no lives, it pays 5 instead.
The one bird on the table you are not meant to shoot. Only the colour marks it out. Shoot it and the table loses a life — in versus, two points off whoever fired.
THE ROOM IS THE JOYSTICK.
Same island, four seats, one local Wi-Fi network — no account and nothing through a server. Every step you take around the table opens one firing line and closes another, so the best players are the ones who move.
One flock, one rack of three ducks the table may lose, one score. A shell waved through the raft costs the person next to you. What each player scored still shows — the number the round is played for is the sum.
No lives at all: the clock is the only thing that ends it, and the only question is who shot better. A gold duck pays 5 instead of a life, and a black duck takes 2 off whoever shot it.
Flat-shaded low poly with one warm light and hard facet edges, so the island reads like something carved and painted — and sits believably on your real desk. Terracotta, jade and lotus pink, straight from the Vietnamese wetland the game is named after in its own language — Đầm Sen, the lotus pond. Plays in English or Tiếng Việt.
IN THE WILD.
