How to play
- Goal
- Race three laps against seven rival mages and cross the line first.
- How it ends
- A race ends when you cross the line after the third lap; your place earns a gold, silver or bronze medal, and fourth or worse earns none.
- Record
- The fastest race and the fastest lap on each track; every finished race counts.
- After the countdown your kart drives forward on its own; steer it round three laps and cross the line first. Brake slows it and reverses it when stopped. Off the road, on the verge, a kart is slow.
- Hold Drift while you steer into a bend: the kart slides round on a tight arc and its sparks turn blue, then orange. Let go for a burst of speed, longer after orange sparks. Press Drift just before GO and hold it through GO for a spark start.
- Drive through a rune crystal with your hand empty and it deals you a spell after a moment; press Spell to cast it. Ember Bolts fly ahead, Seeker Wisps chase the kart in front, Frost Runes drop behind you, a Ward stops one spell. Run the whole cup to race its four tracks for points: 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1 by place.
Controls
| Steer ◀ ▶ (held) · ← → · A D | Steer |
|---|---|
| Drift (held) · Space · Shift | Drift; let go for a boost |
| Spell · X · E · ↑ | Cast your spell |
| Brake (held) · ↓ · S | Brake, or reverse when stopped |
| R | Restart the race |
| Escape | Pause (the race then no longer counts for the tables) |
The karts, trees, houses and rocks are warehouse 3D models drawn with three.js; the fonts and sounds come from the Morass warehouse, and the roads, walls and skies are painted by the game as it loads. A race is sent as your controls alone, and the records worker races it again, rivals included, with the same core before it ranks the result. Your progress stays in this browser under morass.spell-karts.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
About Spell Karts
A kart racer in full 3D on the fair circuits of Vothmark, where every summer the academies' apprentices race rune-driven carts with licensed cantrips: a fireball, a homing wisp, a frost rune dropped behind, a gust, a ward, a thunder hex, a comet. Seven rival mages line up beside you on cobbled meadow roads, desert flagstones, icy snow roads and black volcanic stone.
The rivals cannot cheat. They drive karts exactly like yours with the same controls, and nothing about them is faster; each cup's rivals simply drive better, and from the Frost Cup some of them drift. Spells are dealt from one table by place for every kart, printed in the rules: the back of the field gets the strongest, the leader the defensive ones. Every race on a track is the same race, so a track can be learned.
There are sixteen tracks in four cups, each land with its own hazard: sand that slows the inside of the bends, ice that slides you wide, stone pillars standing on the road. Run a whole cup for its trophy on points, or race any track alone. Each track keeps a Top 10 for the fastest race and one for the fastest lap, and the site runs the whole race again, rivals and spells included, before it keeps a place.
