⛳ Putt Parlor

The bank is the opponent

You start the run with ten strokes and that is the entire supply. Every putt spends one, from any hole, and sinking the ball pays back the hole's par — not what you actually used. So each hole settles up at par minus strokes. Take two on a par 4 and you walk away two strokes richer than you arrived; take six and you are down two and carrying that debt to the next tee. The twelve pars run 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, which is 41 strokes of credit available on a lap against a starting float of ten.

The bank running dry does not stop the shot you are in the middle of. The run ends when the ball comes to rest with nothing left, which means a last stroke that drops is a last stroke that refunds — you can be at zero in mid-roll and still be alive a second later. Everything else about the game follows from that one piece of accounting: this is a resource game wearing a putting green's clothes, and a beautiful shot that takes four attempts is worse than an ugly one that takes two.

Clear all twelve holes and the course loops with every par cut by one, floored at two, so the second lap is worth 32 strokes of credit and the third only 26. The layouts stop getting harder; the terms do.

How the ball behaves

Rolling resistance is exponential rather than linear: each 1/120-second step multiplies the ball's speed by e raised to minus 1.4 times the step, so roughly three-quarters of the speed is gone after a second of open green. Below 6 pixels per second the ball is declared at rest and you may aim again. A full-power putt leaves the tee at 1,200 pixels per second and, left alone, would coast about 850 pixels before stopping — more than the length of the field, which is why maximum power on a straight hole always means at least one wall.

Walls return 85% of the speed you bring into them, so bank shots are cheap but not free. The pink bumpers reflect off the same 85% and then multiply the whole velocity by 1.15, which very nearly cancels the loss and pays you 10 points per genuine contact into the bargain — they are the one obstacle in the game that is on your side. The cup is fussier than it looks: the ball only drops if it is inside the 16-pixel radius and travelling slower than 340 pixels per second. Arrive faster and it rattles the lip instead, keeps 55% of its speed, and gets kicked about 26 degrees off line. The faint pull toward the hole only engages within about a ball-and-a-half of the centre and only while the ball is already slow, so it tidies up a good lag rather than rescuing a bad one.

Twelve holes, one plan

The dotted aim line shows direction and power and nothing else — it does not trace bounces, so every carom is read by eye. That, plus the lip-out rule, makes the aggressive line quietly expensive. A hole-in-one on a par 4 is worth 2,400 points and three strokes of bank, against 1,100 points and two strokes for a comfortable two-putt, but the failed ace usually arrives at the cup too fast, skids past on a 26-degree deflection, and leaves you a longer second putt than a lag would have. Two attempts at the ace on the same hole and you have spent the entire margin the two-putt would have earned.

The rule of thumb that survives contact with the later holes: gamble while the bank is fat and the par is generous, lag when it is thin. Under about six strokes in hand, treat every hole as a lag to a tap-in and take par. It pays 500 points, keeps the bank flat, and buys you the holes where the ace is genuinely on. Posting a score to the shared leaderboard is optional and happens only if you type a name and press Post at the end of a run — that writes one record with the game id, your name, the score and a server timestamp, and stores the name in your browser for next time. If the leaderboard fails to load, the golf is identical; only the online board goes quiet.