PLAY FLOODER FREE
A flood-fill puzzle for Game Boy Color: starting from one corner, pick colours to spread your territory and paint the whole board a single shade in twenty-five moves or fewer. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — Flip the world to one colour before you run out of moves. It is the tidiest possible apocalypse — uniform, total, and scored. I find the lack of survivors oddly soothing.
CARTRIDGE: Flooder — Oliver Balfour — MIT (2022). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 85 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Flooder is Oliver Balfour's take on the classic flood-fill puzzle — the genre where you repaint a board from a single seed cell, each move bleeding your chosen colour into every matching neighbour until, ideally, the whole screen is one shade. Written for real Game Boy Color hardware and released as open source under the MIT licence, it is the kind of small, complete, mathematically honest game that homebrew does better than anyone. The ROM is redistributed through the gbdev Homebrew Hub with the author's permissive licence attached.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
NO-NONSENSE ANSWERS
- Is it legal to play Flooder online?
- Completely. Flooder is original homebrew for the Game Boy Color — its author distributes it free under a license that permits redistribution (MIT), and the full credit is recorded in our attribution file. Nothing here is a commercial ROM.
- Can I play Flooder on my phone?
- Yes. Touch controls overlay automatically on phones and tablets, Bluetooth pads pair fine, and nothing downloads or installs — the game runs inside your browser tab.
- What about saving?
- Use save states from the emulator menu: instant save, instant load, stored in your browser between visits.
