How to play Fairway — Mini Golf

Top-down mini golf, nine holes a day. Drag back from the ball, let go, and chase a par a solver already sank.

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Fairway is a top-down putting game. Everything below follows from two things: the ball obeys one physics step function, and par is a number that step function has already proved.

The shot

Press anywhere on the course and drag away from the ball. The direction you drag is the direction the ball will leave in, reversed — you are pulling the club back — and the distance you drag sets the power, shown as a ring filling around the ball. A dotted line traces the opening of the shot, including the first rail it will hit. Release to play it. A drag of almost nothing is treated as a change of mind and costs nothing.

Every release is one stroke. There is no limit on strokes: you can always finish a hole, however badly it is going.

The course

The turf slows the ball at a steady rate, so a putt travels roughly as far as the square of the power you gave it. The rails around the green are solid and bouncy, losing about a quarter of the ball's speed on each hit, which makes banking a genuine tactic rather than a mistake.

Sand is the ball killer. It brakes about five times as hard as grass, so a shot that clips a bunker on the way past will not reach the other side of it. Plan to carry sand with speed or go around it.

Water is absolute. The moment the ball's centre crosses into it you take a penalty stroke and the ball is replaced exactly where you played the shot from — so a pond is never a shortcut, and the route around it is the only route.

Slopes push the ball while it is moving and let go as it slows, which means a slope bends a fast shot much more than a soft one. Reading a slope is really reading how much speed you intend to be carrying when you cross it.

The cup takes the ball when it arrives slowly enough. Come in too hot and the ball lips out and rolls on, which is the most expensive mistake in the game and the reason the last putt is almost always softer than it looks.

Where par comes from

Before a hole is playable, the game sweeps the whole shot space from the tee — every angle at five-degree steps, at twelve power settings — and simulates each one to a stop through the exact step function the live ball uses. If any of them sinks, par is one. If none do, every distinct resting position that sweep produced becomes the start of another sweep, and so on. The first depth at which a shot drops in is the par, and the shots that did it are kept as a witness.

The witness is the point. A par with no witness is a claim; a par with one is a replay. The bundle exposes `window.__proveHole(seed)`, which returns the par and the shot list, and a verifier that plays that list back from the tee and checks it sinks on exactly the last shot. Both run against the same code the ball rolls on, so there is no second physics engine to drift from the first.

The search is bounded on purpose — two lattices, a capped frontier of resting positions and a depth ceiling of four. That bound only ever moves par upward: every extra shot considered can lower the number and none can raise it, so the number on the HUD is a target the game has proved reachable, not one it hopes is.

A round

Nine holes. Strokes accumulate against the sum of the pars, shown live as E, a minus or a plus. The scorecard at the end gives every hole's par and your strokes on it, colour-coded from eagle to double bogey, plus the total and a spoiler-free grid to share. The daily course resets at midnight local time and carries a streak; free play deals a new nine whenever you want one.

Controls

Drag back from the ball to aim and load power, then release to putt.

Keyboard

Left and Right swing the aim and Up and Down set the power.
Space plays the shot, and holding Shift while turning makes the aim fine.

Strategy tips

Putt for position, not for the cup. On a par 3 the first shot's only job is to reach somewhere with a clean line, and the fastest way to a bogey is trying to hole out from a place with no line.
Soften the last putt. The cup rejects a ball arriving too fast, and a lip-out from six inches costs the same stroke as a shot from the other end of the course.
Use the rails deliberately. A bank off a wall loses about a quarter of the ball's speed, so plan the bounce and add power for it rather than aiming as if the wall were not there.
Never cross sand. A bunker takes the pace out of a ball in about a cell, so go around it even when around looks twice as long.
Treat water as a wall you can accidentally walk through. It is a penalty stroke and a reset, which usually costs two strokes in practice, and no shortcut is worth that.
Cross a slope fast or not at all. A slope pushes a moving ball and releases a slow one, so a firm shot holds its line where a gentle one gets swept sideways.
Watch the dotted guide's first bounce, not its end. The preview stops early on purpose — it tells you the angle you are actually leaving the rail at, which is the part that is hard to judge by eye.
If a hole says par 2 and you cannot see a two-shot line, you are missing a bank. The number was proved by a shot that exists, so the line is there.