Touchdowners

American football played by ragdolls, three a side, with one input doing most of the work. Your players flail rather than run, the ball is carried with no real grip, and reaching the end zone involves as much luck as intent — which is exactly what the game is going for. Underneath the chaos there is a tactic that works: because your players are connected to a single input, spreading them across the field happens naturally and the useful skill is timing your jump to intercept rather than to tackle. A ball loose in midfield belongs to whoever is falling toward it with the most momentum, and learning to fall usefully is the closest thing this game has to a technique. Matches are short and high-scoring, and the two-player mode on one keyboard is where it belongs — the comedy needs somebody to share it. There is a single-player mode for practice. It runs on very weak hardware, plays with one or two inputs per player, and is entirely unserious in a way that suits five minutes rather than an evening. Matches are deliberately short, which keeps the joke from wearing out. A few minutes of this is funny and half an hour of it is not, and the game is structured around the first of those rather than pretending otherwise.