pin.games

I am a ward of eight beds, and you are the breathing in each of them. Hold the belly and the diaphragm pulls down; hold the chest and the ribs lift too. Let go and the lung breathes out by itself. Every patient needs a different breath — slow and small for a panic attack, a long way out for asthma, deep and held for a broken rib — and the monitor tells you, in oxygen and carbon dioxide, whether you have found it.

I am a baker's notebook. On each page a loaf to bake — a tin loaf, fine and even; a country loaf, open and airy with a crackling crust; a ciabatta, wild with holes; and one of your own. You pour the water, knead the dough until it stretches thin against the light, let it rise as long as you dare, choose the oven, and take it out when you think it is done. Then you cut it. The crumb inside is the picture of everything you did — and I tell you what it says: too little water, too short a rise, an oven too cool.

I am a notebook about seeing. My first page is eight blots of black and white: you will not know what they are — until you glimpse the photograph each was made from, and then you will never stop seeing it. My other pages are a wood, by day and by night, with faces in its bark and its stones: shadow in two hollows, a split beneath. First you look with nothing to go on; then I tell you how many there are, and you find more. At the end I show you every face I hid — and every face you found that I never made, because your brain made it.

I am a page of Leonardo's anatomy, and the body on me can be opened. Draw your finger across the skin and it peels away like an orange's, and under it the muscles lie as he drew them, in lines of ink that run the way each one pulls; go a layer deeper and you can lift them too, and under them is the bone. Each page names a few things to lay bare — the trapezius, the deltoid, the shoulder blade, the tendons of the hand — and as each one shows I write its name beside it in the margin. When all of them are bare, your page is laid beside the sheet of his it comes from. Six pages, from the shoulder to the hand, and no clock.

I am a river on a page of Leonardo's notebook, drawn in ink by the water as it moves. Tap to set a stone in me and I go round it, and behind it I curl into the whirls he spent years drawing; draw a finger through me and I follow it. Each page asks one thing of me — a whirl, one great slow eddy, still water round a boat, a mill wheel turning, three leaves through a bridge's middle arch, red water carried to the far bank — and when I do it the ink dries and the page is kept. In every margin there is a note of his, written backwards as he wrote, and it turns round to be read when the page is done. There is no clock and nothing to lose; the last page has no task at all.

I am an anatomy table with real bones on it, in 3D, to turn with a finger. Pick a muscle and touch the two places it attaches — the biceps' long head above the shoulder socket, its tendon on the radius — then press Try: the joint bends and straightens. A muscle hooked on the wrong side is dragged longer while it pulls, and tears; one too weak leaves the bag halfway. Eleven puzzles, from the elbow to the hip on all three of its axes; eight patients who come with one thing wrong — a muscle, or a nerve — to find and fix; a load test; after a win, the Latin name of a muscle and its insertion, typed from memory; and an atlas of every head of every muscle, each named in Latin with a sentence about what it does. The simple mode asks for the main muscles in plain words and helps after a tear; the realistic one asks for every head, the way a physiotherapy course does.

I am a dark lab full of atoms made of light. Hold down and my magnet pulls them; flip it and it pushes. Each order names a molecule — water, ozone, ammonia, sulfuric acid — and when its atoms meet in the ring, threads of light draw them together until they sink into one another and become it. Every new one is kept in your atlas, and stays in the lab as a drifting constellation. Sulfur, chlorine and phosphorus join as you go. The green atoms are the danger: knock one hard and it may split, wait too long and it splits by itself. Guide it into the silver cage — or bring two together gently and they turn to gold. A split clears what is near it and stops the atoms for a while; the lab can take three.

I am twenty-one days in the Republic of Bureaucristan, and a file that is never quite complete. By day you go from office to office, and every office issues one document — copy your passport without a single typo, win over your old physics teacher, survive the queue at the police station. By night you flip burgers at the Burger Bureau, and the mistakes come out of your pay. At home your father is getting older and Karabaş, the dog, waits by the door; every dollar for the visa is a dollar that does not go to rent, pills or the vet. Eleven endings, one of them secret. Out now on Steam.

I am five very dirty places and a jet of water. Hold down and move it over the dirt: a slow pass clears a clean stripe, a quick one thins it, and the mud runs down in drops. When a part is completely clean it squeaks and shines and says its name; when the whole place is clean it sparkles. The dirt pays coins, and the coins buy better tools — a pressure washer for a car's road film, a turbo nozzle for a stove's baked grease, and a surface cleaner for floors, the only thing that lifts the terrace's black lichen. There is no timer and nothing to lose; a half-washed place waits where you left it.

I am a line of light that beats with a song. A pulse runs along it, and wherever the drums hit hard the line itself leaps into a peak or drops into a gap. Tap, or press Space, on the beat and the pulse jumps it; touch one and the song stops and starts again from the top, with the percentage you reached. Every attempt is the same track, so each one gets you further. There are eighteen songs, slow to fast, and each opens when you finish the one before. Every song can be run three ways: Easy, with a ring that closes on the beat; Normal, with many more of the drums' beats; and Hard, where the song's busiest instrument joins the drums and the jumps come on the half-beats too.

I am a small farm with one hen on it and a stall by the road. Walk to the crate and pick up the eggs, carry them to the stall, and the customers who stop pay into the cash box. Stand on a green pad and it takes the money and builds: another hen, a basket, a sign by the road, a second coop. Then the farm starts working by itself — belts from the crates, a farmhand, a cashier — and the eggs become boxes in the packing shed and cakes in the bakery, and a truck takes a load to the city market. At night a fox comes out of the wood or the hedges: run into it and it drops the hen and runs, or fence the yards and get a dog. At the end of it all waits the Golden Hen. Every morning the hens are hungry: feed each coop at its trough, because a hungry hen lays nothing and hens left hungry until the next morning die. The farm waits where you left it.

I am a four-minute brawl on open water. Seven boats, sixty balloons, and one crown that everybody can see. Pop a balloon for a weapon, knock the tokens out of whoever is winning, and be the one holding the most when the whistle goes. Free, with real people or bots, on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android.

I am ten and a half kilometres of granite cobblestone above Airolo, cut from Switzerland's own survey: thirty hairpins, seven hundred and thirty-eight metres of climb, and a clock that never stops. Come and drive me. The corners are where the real road puts them.

I am an island with an eagle over it. Come and fly it: stoop on the gulls that work my shore, and carry ten of them home to the nest.

Fly a seagull over the shore — glide, dive, and time your special delivery on the crowd below.

Play a sudoku that feels made for tonight — five themes, nine languages, and a puzzle that is never the same twice.