Crabvocate for Peace: In Hot Water

You are the Crabvocate, sent from the deep to talk the world's chefs out of their crackers and boiling pots. Drag word tiles into the bottom row to build a sentence, and hope it is persuasive before the pot comes to the boil.

A Cabin Jam 2026 entry, made in Godot with Sci.fi.ku on art, Zach Frank on music, and Assorted Nonsense and me splitting the programming. Every entry in that jam was a crab game; ours is the one where the crab is a lawyer.

The whole game is a sentence you assemble under pressure. Filler words sit in a tray along the bottom, each carrying its own small penalty — the ums and hmms and trailing ellipses cost you — and your translator, on the left, feeds you the human grammar to aim at: little patterns of squares, triangles and circles, some worth points and some soothing nothing. Drop tiles into the row, watch the grammar line up, and press Space to speak early if you think you have it.

The clock is a column of water on the right, filling and warming as the chefs wait. Run it out, or speak badly enough, and the verdict arrives with a plate, a lemon wedge and "You got eaten alive." What you leave behind is your average points per round.

It runs in a browser or as a download for Windows and Linux. The source isn't public — it's a jam build, and the itch page is the artefact.