game · 2 min
Wormhole Router
Route a data packet across the galaxy by picking which wormholes it rides — then watch Dijkstra grade your flight plan. The cheap first hop is usually a trap, the direct link is usually overpriced, and you are competing against an algorithm that checks every route before breakfast.
Five rounds of interstellar packet routing. Each star system is a swirling wormhole portal; each link has a latency in milliseconds. Click adjacent systems to build a route, hit launch, and the packet spirals into one portal and out of the next while the latency meter keeps the receipts. On arrival, the optimal route appears in green — computed by Dijkstra, who does not negotiate.
The rounds are tuned to break specific instincts: the round where one big wormhole loses to three small ones (fewest hops is not fastest), the round where the 20 ms bargain hop leads into a 300 ms corner (greedy commits early, pays later), and the round where two routes land within 5% of each other — a genuine tie, which real networks call ECMP and split traffic across instead of arguing. It’s the same search your nav app reruns at every traffic jam, with edge weights swapped for live road speeds. If you prefer your routing done by raw physics instead of graph theory, Gravity Courier is next door.
Score per round is 100 × optimal ÷ yours; perfect routes (and legitimate ties) score the full hundred. Best total over five rounds is saved to localStorage. Single HTML file, no dependencies.