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Four steaks · One rule · Unofficial fan tribute
The Medium Rare Line
You are Hank Hill, and the grill is going. Four steaks, four neighbours waiting, and one standard that does not move: medium rare, and never one degree past it. Flip them before they char, slide them to the cool edge to buy yourself time, and get them off below the band — because a steak keeps cooking after it leaves the heat, and nothing on earth brings it back.
Lighting the grill…
How it works
Four slots. Steaks arrive on their own and start climbing the moment they hit the grate. Each one needs three decisions from you and only one of them is reversible.
Flip it. Every steak has to be turned before it passes about 112°F or one face chars — points off, never fatal. Move it. The middle of the grill is direct heat and fast; the edge is indirect heat and roughly a third of the speed. Moving a steak to the edge is the only brake in the game. Pull it. This is the one that counts, and it is the one you cannot undo.
On a phone every slot carries its own buttons, so the whole game is thumbs. On a keyboard, 1–4 picks a slot, F flips, E moves it between the middle and the edge, space pulls it, and T swaps the propane tank.
Why the target is lower than the target
Medium rare is 130–135°F. Those are the real numbers, out of any kitchen that writes them down: rare sits below, medium starts above. But the window marked on each slot's gauge is not 130–135 — it is 125–130, and the first time you see that it looks like a mistake.
It is not. Meat carries on cooking after it comes off the heat. The outside of a steak is far hotter than the middle, and when you take it off that heat keeps travelling inward: the centre climbs roughly another five degrees while it rests. So pulling a steak at medium rare lands it past medium rare, every single time. You have to pull it early and let the rest do the last five degrees for you. The game shows you this happening — a pulled steak sits on the board and climbs while you watch — because it is the one thing here worth actually learning, and because a rule this counter-intuitive has to be demonstrated rather than asserted.
Why going over is the only thing that ends you
Pull too early and you have served somebody a rare steak. That is a disappointment. It scores less, nobody is happy, and the cookout carries on.
Go past 135 and that steak is gone. Not "worth fewer points" — gone, and it counts as one of the three that ends your afternoon. The asymmetry is the entire design, and it comes straight out of the premise: a man who has one standard and will not move it does not get graded on a curve in both directions. Under is a shame. Over is a failure. There is no version of this game where they weigh the same.
Forget a steak entirely and it climbs past saving on its own, which is there so that ignoring a slot is never a way to keep the board manageable.
The fire fights back
Fat drips onto the burner and comes back as flame. A flare-up picks one steak on the direct heat and makes it climb two and a half times as fast until you deal with it, and the way you deal with it is the way anybody actually deals with it: move the steak off the fire. There is no bucket of water in this game and there should not be.
The propane is a clock, not a puzzle. It drains the whole time the burner is lit, and a tank running on fumes cooks slowly, which quietly puts everything on the grate behind at once. Swapping is instant and free — the cost is the relight, a moment where the middle of the grill is barely hotter than the edge. Choosing when to spend that moment is the only long-range decision in the game. Naturally there is no charcoal option. There was never going to be one.
Who is waiting on a plate
The names above each slot will be familiar to anyone who has spent time on Rainey Street. Dale Gribble wants to watch you do it, because Dale wants to watch anybody do anything. Bill Dauterive is grateful to have been invited and will take his steak however it comes off. Boomhauer orders in as few words as the situation allows. Peggy is certain she would know the difference and she is not wrong. Bobby wants exactly what his father is having. Kahn is unimpressed with the equipment on principle, and Minh intends to check the middle. Buck Strickland turns up wanting it to look easy. Every one of those lines was written fresh for this page out of what the show has already established about the person saying it — the situations are theirs, the sentences are ours.
Where the writing comes from
Some of the lines a neighbour hands you, and some of the verdicts on a finished cookout, are written by a language model, sanitised on the server, and delivered along with the page — the same arrangement the rest of this corner uses. The model is never given a character's name and is never asked to write dialogue for one, so a name and a written line only ever meet in the hand-written bank. If nothing arrives — no key configured, no network, a locked-down browser — the game is complete anyway, because every slot has a written original underneath it. Nothing about the simulation is generated: the heat rates, the bands, the carryover, the flare-ups and the scoring are all arithmetic, on the grounds that a game whose difficulty a model chose is a game nobody can get good at.
What stays on your machine, and what the site records
The cookout runs entirely in your browser. No account, no sign-up, and nothing you do at the grill leaves the page while you play. Your best score is remembered on your own machine and nowhere else, and clearing your browser data forgets it. The only thing you send anywhere yourself is the share link you choose to copy.
The page itself is recorded, like every page on this site — the banner script sets a cookie, logs your IP address, your device and where you came from, and ties the visit to your account if you are signed in. How you played is not in that; the fact that you opened this page is. What we record, and why.
Sharing a cookout
When the cookout ends the address bar changes. That link opens on your exact score for whoever you send it to, and they can light their own grill from the same page — which is the entire multiplayer feature and, for a game of this kind, is usually enough of one.
This is fan-made, and unofficial
This is a fan game inspired by the animated series King of the Hill, naming it, its characters, its town and the propane business at the centre of it under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to 20th Television, Disney, Fox Broadcasting Company, or any official rights holder of King of the Hill.
Every word on this page was written for it. These pages do name the series' real characters, its places and its running situations, and describe them in prose written here — naming a work and the things in it, and stating known facts about them, is nominative fair use and is the posture this whole corner operates under. What is never reproduced is the series' own expression: no dialogue, no script text, no lyric, and no still, screenshot, logo or artwork appears anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of King of the Hill. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.
The rest of the corner
The King of the Hill wing has the propane counter, the fence quiz and the rest alongside this. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros and Supernatural wings too, and the free tools that are not about anybody's fiction. If you would rather play something with more to it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.