Free · in your browser · ~5 minutes
CANOPY
One operative. One clearing.
Everything in it wants you gone.
A first-person shooter compressed into five minutes. The Red Dust Brigade doesn't run at you in a line — it leans out from behind trunks, charges from your blind side, lies prone in grass that only rustles, and puts drones above the treeline that you cannot see until they fire. Your rounds stop at a wall exactly like theirs do. Ten waves, thirty seconds each, and a Gunship at the end of it.
- Cover is real — bullets stop at it, yours included, until you shoot it apart
- Mouse or thumbs — pointer-lock on desktop, twin-stick with aim assist on a phone
- Same jungle for everyone — one seeded sector per UTC day, afternoon to twilight
click to capture the mouse
How to play
Everything about Canopy is built so that holding one angle gets you killed. The clock spawns the next wave whether or not you finished the last one, and the Brigade always has someone working around your flank.
Desktop
Click the viewport to capture the mouse. WASD moves, the mouse looks, left click fires and right click brings up the sights — tighter, but slower on your feet. Escape gives the cursor back.
Fullscreen
Press F or hit FULL in the corner of the frame to fill the whole screen, and the same again — or Escape — to drop back to the page. The sector is unchanged either way: a bigger screen shows you more of the clearing at once, it does not change what spawns or where.
Phone
Left thumb drives, right thumb looks, and the weapon fires itself when the crosshair finds a target. Double-tap the right side to dash; a second finger there brings up the sights.
Dash
Space, or a double-tap. A hard burst in the direction you're moving with a quarter-second of immunity — enough to pass straight through a Berserker's charge. Ninety seconds is roughly twenty dashes and there is no other escape.
Three armour segments
They do not regenerate. Only Body Armor adds one and only Life-Drain ever repairs one. Every segment you still hold at extraction is worth 1,000 points, so a careful run outscores a greedy one.
A gun and a knife
You deploy with a primary — rifle or shotgun — and the combat knife, always. Q swaps between them. The knife never runs dry, ignores cover entirely and cuts everything in a 200° arc, which is what you want when a Scout rush is on top of you mid-reload; it just cannot reach a drone. From wave 3 you can requisition the other gun and carry all three. Reload with R, or don't, and it reloads itself when the magazine runs out.
Read the warning
Nothing shoots at you before wave 5. From then on, anything firing from concealment — a Sniper leaning out, a Drone dropping in — commits about two thirds of a second before its first round, and for that moment an amber chevron marks its bearing on the ring around your crosshair, with a chirp panned to the same side. Turn until the chevron is at twelve o'clock and you are looking at it. Ignore it and you eat the shot.
Listen
Footsteps carry about twenty metres and pan to the side they come from, so something crossing behind you is audible before it is visible — and the Brigade always has someone working around your flank. Heavy units tread heavier. Sound is on by default; M mutes it, but you will play worse.
Field kits are one-shot
Elites drop them from wave 7, and shooting cover apart sometimes shakes one loose. You carry one at a time, so picking up a second throws the first away.
The sector is a weapon
Eight to twelve objects stand in every clearing and the day's seed decides which and where. They are not scenery — they decide what can shoot what, and they decide it symmetrically.
Hard cover
Trees, boulders, ruined walls, crates and toppled pillars stop rounds dead — yours as much as theirs. A Sniper behind a trunk cannot be hit until it leans out, and that lean is your entire window.
Soft cover
Waist-high grass hides anything prone in it until it is nearly on top of you, and slows whoever walks through — you included. You get the rustle and nothing else.
Destructible
Crates and weak walls come apart under fire, under a Berserker's charge, or under an Airburst. Boulders and trees never do. Once cover falls it stays gone, and you both have to live in the new sector.
Reinforced
From wave 6 the Brigade shores up what is still standing: everything destructible takes twice the punishment. The clearing stops opening up right when you need it to.
The shield
A Combat Engineer is untouchable while the crate it works behind is intact. Killing it is a demolition job, not a damage race — which is why it always sets up behind something that can be destroyed.
Headshots
The top fifth of a body counts double. Nothing announces it, no bonus text — the target just drops in half the rounds, which over a run is the difference between reloading twice and reloading four times.
The Red Dust Brigade
Seven unit types on a schedule, plus whatever the Engineers put down. The first four waves are a movement problem — things that run at you. Nothing shoots back until wave 5, and from there the ranged pressure climbs every wave. By wave 9 they are faster, tougher and better organised than anything wave 1 taught you to expect.
| Unit | From | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Scout | Wave 1 | Light infantry. Sprints straight in, ignores cover entirely, and there is never just one. |
| Sniper | Wave 5 | Takes one post and holds it. Leans out, fires, ducks back — it never repositions. Two arrive at wave 5 and one more each wave after; from wave 7 they fire twice before hiding. |
| Berserker | Wave 3 | Telegraphs from the treeline, then runs one dead-straight line and smashes any destructible cover on it. |
| Chem-Trooper | Wave 5 | Wades up out of a stream and closes slowly, laying smoke that blinds the sector for five seconds. |
| Drone Gunner | Wave 6 | Circles above the treeline, invisible until its guns light up, then strafes three rounds from maximum range. |
| Squad Leader | Wave 7 | Red armband, and every Scout near it moves half again as fast. Priority target, and it knows it. |
| Combat Engineer | Wave 8 | Shielded behind a crate, deploying an automated turret every five seconds until you take that crate apart. |
| The Gunship | Wave 10 | Circles out of reach behind the ruins and will not come down while its ground troops live. Then it hovers and fires missile salvos. Then it comes down on top of you. |
Today's board
Daily Op only — one ranked run each. Everyone on it deployed into the identical sector against the identical spawn schedule, so the ranking ranks the run rather than the roll.
Loading today's board…
You get one ranked attempt a day — the first Daily Op you finish. Posting is entirely optional and needs no account: type a callsign, or don't, and the run still counts for you locally. You can remove your entry from the same browser at any time. Free Deployment is never ranked.
Questions
How long is a run?
About five minutes. Nine waves of thirty seconds plus however long the Gunship takes — under sixty seconds triples your entire score, so there is a real reason to be quick about it.
Is it free?
Yes, and there is nothing to buy. Score is score. No Playdeck24 game has purchasable currency.
Why did my shots stop connecting?
Something is in the way. The rifle and shotgun are blocked by trees, boulders, walls, crates and pillars exactly as the Brigade's fire is. Move off the angle, shoot the cover apart if it is destructible, or switch to the knife — it sweeps rather than shoots, so cover means nothing to it.
Is there aim assist?
On touch, yes and generously: a target within about 15° of the crosshair pulls your shots onto it, and the weapon fires itself when one is in the cone. On a mouse it is barely there — a mouse does not need help, and a gun that swings itself under a cursor feels like the game is playing instead of you.
What does "same jungle for everyone" actually mean?
The day's seed fixes which cover objects exist and where they stand, which unit walks out at which second of which wave and from behind what, and the order the requisition cards are shuffled into. Two players on opposite sides of the planet get the identical ambush at the identical second. Only what you did about it differs.
Why can't I start with just the knife?
Because you could not win with it. Melee cannot reach a Drone Gunner nine metres up, and it could not reach the Gunship at all — so a knife-only run could never kill the boss, and on about a third of daily seeds it was never even offered a gun to recover with. Rather than leave a choice on the start card that quietly ends your run, the knife is now something you always carry. It kept everything that made it good: no ammo, no reload, ignores cover, hits the whole arc. And the Gunship's last phase now genuinely crashes into the clearing, so you can finish it with the knife if you want to.
Do the requisition cards differ between players?
The list and its order do not. You see the first three on that shared list that would still do something for your build — a maxed Fleetfoot, or a mod for a weapon you never picked up, is skipped rather than wasted. Take different weapons and you walk a different path through the same deck.
How am I supposed to find the Snipers?
They tell you, and then they stand still for you. A Sniper takes one post at the start of the wave and holds it — it never repositions and never follows you around its cover. About two thirds of a second before firing it leans out, and for that moment an amber chevron appears on the ring around your crosshair pointing at its bearing, a chirp plays panned to that side, and a bright pip sits above the Sniper so you can pick it out once you have turned. It stays out of cover while it shoots and for half a second afterwards — roughly one and a half seconds exposed in total, against the half second a rifle needs to drop one. Learn where a post is and you can pre-aim it for the rest of the wave. Drone Gunners telegraph the same way.
Why can I hear things I cannot see?
Because you are meant to. Every footfall is a positioned sound: its volume falls off with distance and it pans to the bearing it comes from, relative to where you are looking — so turning your head moves it, which is what makes it usable for locating a flanker in tall grass. Audio is on from the moment you deploy; M or the speaker button mutes it.
Can I play fullscreen?
Yes — press F, or the FULL button in the corner of the frame. Escape or F again brings it back to the page. It changes nothing about the run: the sector, the spawns and the upgrade order are fixed by the day's seed, and a wider view simply shows more of the clearing at once. On an iPhone, Safari offers no true fullscreen for anything but video, so the button expands the game to fill the browser viewport instead.
Does it need a fast machine?
It is hand-written WebGL with no external libraries and no textures — flat-shaded low-poly geometry, one draw call for the whole sector and one for all the grass. There is nothing to download beyond the page itself.
Is there a leaderboard?
Yes, for the Daily Op. One ranked run per player per day — the first one you finish — and posting is optional: no account, just a callsign. The server revalidates every submission against the day's seed, regenerating the same sector and spawn schedule the browser ran, so a score that the day could not have produced is refused rather than ranked. Free Deployment is never ranked, because every sector is rolled fresh and the runs are not comparable.