Crow — free browser game

Crow is a volume-displacement puzzle built on top of Aesop's fable 'The Crow and the Pitcher'. Each level changes the tube shape — straight cylinder, narrowing neck, hourglass, bottle belly, step, funnel, labyrinth — and you have a limited inventory of three pebble sizes: small, medium, large. Your job is to choose the right combination so that the cork floating on the water surface ends up sitting exactly inside the green target band marked on the tube. Overshoot and the cork drowns; undershoot and the crow stays thirsty — both end the level. Underneath the visuals there is a real volumetric model: the tube is sliced thinly, each slice has its own width, and a pebble's displaced volume raises the water proportionally to the local width at the current surface. So the same small pebble can raise water by 10 units in a narrow neck and only 3 units in a wide belly. Strategy therefore changes per level: in a cylinder, any balanced combination works; in narrowing tubes, 'fill the bottom with bigs, finish with smalls' is the natural plan; in the hourglass, a single small pebble can leap the cork over the band during the waist crossing — be cautious; in the bottle belly, the wide middle takes lots of volume and the narrowing neck needs precise tuning. Your pebble budget is intentionally tight: only specific subsets land you inside the band, so each level becomes a small puzzle of 'which big first, which medium next, which small last'. Scoring rewards leftover pebbles: 100 base + 12 × pebbles remaining. So finishing the same level with fewer pebbles scores higher. Keyboard shortcuts: Space advances every overlay (intro, level start, level cleared, level failed, campaign complete); 1, 2 and 3 drop a small, medium or large pebble respectively; R restarts. On mobile everything works with taps. Your browser stores your highest level reached as your record; if you clear all 8 levels the campaign ends and you can replay from level 1. Tip: at the start of each level, look at both the remaining inventory and the tube shape — large pebbles displace more than medium + small combined, so starting from the bottom is a good default plan, but in narrow necks the decision of 'when not to drop the last big one' can be critical.