The Strickland Shift

How it works

One button. Hold it and the tank fills; let go and whatever is in it is what the customer gets. There is a band marked on the gauge — release inside it and you have served somebody, release outside it and you have not. Three misses and the shift is over.

The space bar does the same job as the button, and holding either one is the entire control scheme. There is no menu, no upgrade tree, no currency and no second verb, because the whole point of the kind of game this is imitating was that you already knew how to play it about four seconds in.

What actually gets harder

Every customer — including the ones you get wrong — the pump runs slightly faster and the band gets slightly narrower. Nothing else changes. That is the difficulty curve in its entirety, and it is deliberately the only one: a game that keeps introducing mechanics is asking you to learn, and this one is asking you to get good at a single thing.

Ramping on failures as well as successes is a small decision worth naming. A game that eases off when you are struggling is being kind at the cost of being fair, and the run stops meaning anything. Here the counter does not care how you are doing.

Letting go dead in the middle of the band is a perfect fill and pays a bonus on top of the streak multiplier, which is where the scores actually come from. Chasing perfects rather than safe fills is the difference between a respectable shift and a good one, and it is also the fastest way to end the shift early.

Overfilling

If you never let go, the tank fills to the top and that is a strike on its own. It exists so that holding the button and hoping is not a strategy — there has to be a losing edge on both sides of the band, or the safe play is to creep up slowly forever.

Who's behind the counter

Most customers are just the street's ordinary traffic, but a few names on the label above the gauge will look familiar — Hank measuring the fill to the exact line and watching you do it, Dale wanting to know precisely what's going into the tank before he'll take it, Boomhauer needing it filled without needing to explain why, Peggy certain she already knows how the job works, Bobby taking his father's word for the size, Bill grateful for whatever time you've got. Every one of those lines was written fresh for this page from what the wing's own fence quiz already says about them — nobody's dialogue is quoted, and nobody's manner of speaking is imitated, only the situation.

Every sixth pump, the customer stops being a customer at all: it's Buck Strickland, the boss, standing right there while you work. The band pulls in a little tighter because he's watching, and a good fill in front of him pays a real bonus on top of everything else — the one moment in the shift with actual stakes attached to who's looking.

Between customers, the alley keeps going without you — Boomhauer at the fence, Dale with the binoculars out again, somebody's dog wandering off. None of it is scored. It's just the block being the block while you fill the next tank.

What the customers say

The line above the gauge is whoever is at the counter telling you what they want. Some of those lines were written for this page and some are written fresh by a language model and delivered with the page, which is the same arrangement the rest of this corner uses — the model is never told a customer's name, and never asked to invent a line for one, so a name and a written line only ever meet in the hand-written bank. If none arrive — no key configured, no network, a browser with everything switched off — the game is complete anyway, because every line has a written original underneath it. Nothing about the difficulty is generated: the fill rate, the band, the boss's cadence and the scoring are 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 shift runs entirely in your browser. No account, no sign-up, and nothing you do at the controls 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.

Sharing a shift

When the shift ends, the address bar changes. That link opens on your exact score for whoever you send it to, and they can start their own shift 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 an unofficial fan game inspired by the television series King of the Hill, naming it 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 fresh for it. No dialogue, script text, scene, logo or artwork from any television series is reproduced anywhere in it, and nothing here imitates an official mark. 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 fence quiz and the others 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.