PARCEL

How to Play Parcel

Parcel is a neon cartography territory-capture arcade game inspired by the classic Qix. You play as a rogue surveyor on a 640-pixel blueprint grid, drawing claim lines through unclaimed open space to capture territory for yourself. The premise is simple but demands constant spatial awareness: your unfinished survey line is your only vulnerability. While you walk along claimed edges you are completely safe, but the moment you venture into open territory you begin drawing a live cyan line — and that line can be destroyed by the drone enforcers patrolling the unclaimed field.

To capture territory, you must draw your line through open space and then close it back onto any claimed cell (including the outer wall border, which is always claimed at the start of every level). The moment you step back onto claimed ground, a flood-fill algorithm instantly determines which cells to add to your claim: it flood-fills outward from each active drone's position to mark all drone-reachable cells as contested, then claims every unclaimed cell that no drone could reach. This means enclosing a region that contains a drone captures nothing — you must herd the drone out of the region first, then claim it. The percentage meter at the top of the screen tracks your progress toward the level's target, which starts at 65% in the early levels and climbs to 80% at higher difficulty.

Deeds are the permanent currency you earn at every level clear. They bank immediately — you keep every Deed you earn even if you fail to clear a later level — and they persist across all browser sessions. Between levels, the Survey Office upgrade screen lets you spend Deeds on a three-branch persistent tech tree: Draftsman upgrades improve your base speed and survivability, Instruments give you tactical tools like drone-distracting decoys and a freeze pulse, and Estate upgrades improve your economy with extra starting lives, pre-claimed territory head-starts, and a Deed-multiplier node.

Controls

• Arrow Keys or WASD: Move the surveyor one cell at a time; hold for continuous movement
• P or Escape: Pause the current level
• F: Drop a Survey Decoy at your position (requires Instruments tech tree unlock)
• G: Trigger Freeze Pulse to freeze all drones (requires Instruments tech tree unlock)
• SFX button: Toggle sound with the SFX button in the lower-left corner of the canvas
• Mobile: Four-direction D-pad in the lower portion of the canvas; tap-sized buttons

Drones and Threats

Level one introduces a single Patrol Drone: a red-orange theodolite sprite that bounces around the open field at a gentle 2.0 cells-per-second, reversing direction when it hits a wall or the edge of your claimed territory. The patrol drone occasionally shifts its heading slightly to stay unpredictable. At level four, the first Chaser Drone joins the field — a variant that actively re-angles toward your position every 380–580 milliseconds. Chasers are not faster than the patrols beside them: on level four a chaser moves at 2.2 cells-per-second against the patrols' 2.8, and it stays a step slower at every level after. Chasers cannot follow you onto claimed ground, but they will track your position in the open field and cut off your escape routes if you are not careful.

The key threat model in Parcel is not so much that a drone will catch you — it's that a drone will walk through your live survey line while you are drawing. Every drone continuously checks its position against your line cells in pixel space. If any drone body comes within 12 pixels of a live line cell, your line is destroyed: every cell you drew reverts to unclaimed open field, you snap back to your anchor point (the safe cell you started drawing from), and you lose one life unless your post-hit invincibility window from a prior hit is still active. During that 800-millisecond window drones pass through your line without destroying it, so two rapid hits in quick succession won't kill you — but the first one is enough to wipe the line and put you back to square one for that claim attempt.

Scoring and Level Progression

Your score for each level is calculated from three components. First, the claim percentage itself: every percentage point of the 900-cell inner playfield you capture is worth 10 points. Second, overshoot bonus: every percentage point you capture above the level's target earns another 5 points — half the base rate — so aggressive claiming is always rewarded. Third, a flat time bonus of 200 points if you clear the level under the time threshold (which starts at two minutes for level one and shrinks as levels advance). Your run score is the sum of all level scores, and the leaderboard tracks your highest run score across all sessions.

Tech Tree Strategy

The Survey Office's three branches hold seven nodes and reward different play styles. Draftsman players invest in raw speed (Line Speed, +0.5 cells/sec per level over two levels, on top of a 4.0 cells/sec base) and survivability (Line Armor, three levels — each one absorbs one line-hit per level without costing a life). Instruments players prefer tactical control: Survey Decoy pulls nearby patrol drones toward a dummy stake, buying time for large claiming sweeps. Freeze Pulse stops all drones in their tracks for three seconds, once per level — four seconds at its second level. Estate players optimize economy: Extra Life adds a life to the start of every level, Head Start pre-claims a central block of territory before drones spawn (making early progress easier), and the Deed Mult node adds 15% to all Deeds earned. Prices inflate as you spread out: every level bought anywhere in the tree adds 2 Deeds to every other node's price, so specialising is cheaper than dabbling.