How to play

You are a farm animal in a small field full of other farm animals. Eat everything. Get enormous. Try very hard not to burst.

Controls

MoveWASD or the arrow keys. On a phone, the stick in the bottom-left corner. Controllers work, and so does ZQSD.

AttackLeft mouse button, or the green ATTACK button. There is a short wind-up before the swing lands, so pick your moment.

DashSpace, or the DASH button. A burst of speed that leaves something unpleasant on the ground behind you for whoever is chasing.

DanceF, middle mouse, or the DANCE button. Tap to ask for a party. Hold to boogie.

EmotesTap the wheel in the corner. Four of them, including one that asks a stranger to dance.

Getting big

Fruit and vegetables grow you a bit. Meat grows you a lot, and meat turns up wherever an animal has just gone, so a scuffle on the other side of the field is worth walking to. You end up several times the size you started. The camera pulls back to keep up with you, and your dash carries you further the bigger you get.

Picking fights

Swing at another animal and you take a bite out of them. Big animals bite harder than small ones, so being the fatter animal matters more than anything else in a scrap: most fights are decided by who ate more before it started. Finish one off and you get a share of everything they were carrying.

Whoever ate you last is marked in red until somebody else takes their place. Getting your own back is worth double.

The pop meter

Once you are as big as an animal can get, meat has nowhere left to go, so it fills a meter instead. Fill it and you burst: you round off into a balloon, strain, hold still for one awful second, and go everywhere. Everything you had lands on the grass for everyone else.

A dash empties the meter. That is the whole bargain, and it is a good one: one more mouthful, or let it out and stay in the game.

Dance parties

Tap DANCE with nobody else calling nearby and you put a ring on the ground and a ? over your head: you are asking. Anyone who taps inside your ring answers, a countdown starts, and at zero a dance floor drops under everybody still standing in it.

Holding DANCE is the boogie: slower, no swinging, and the only way onto somebody else's floor. Dancers keep everyone else off with lasers. Dancing scores, the music changes while you are on the floor, and only one party can be going at a time.

The farm is not on your side

The tractorCrosses the field in a straight line and gives you a warning first. It ploughs everything in the way, food included. You can hear it coming a long way off.

The UFOBeams you up and makes you a mutant with a power for thirty seconds. You cannot eat while it has hold of you: your belly bar becomes the ship's dinner instead, and filling it buys your freedom. Run the clock out and the death ray goes off. It will not bother with anyone too big to lift.

The swarmFlies. They slow you down and they follow you about.

RainMakes the ground slippery. Also makes puddles, which is the nicest thing on the farm.

The crazy farmerThe tractor. Again. And again. With no gap at all.

Coins, chores and dressing up

Coins come from playing well, and from three chores that change every day. Spend them on new animals, hats, skins and effects, or watch an advert and borrow something locked for ten minutes. Four animals are free and eighteen have to be earned or bought.

Your own records live in Barn Records: longest life, best score, longest spell in first place, longest dance party, and how long you have spent as each animal.

Playing with other people

Loading the page drops you into the busiest farm that still has room, up to sixteen animals. There is nothing to pick and no link to send anyone: the arena is already running behind the menu before you press GO. If the farm is asleep it takes a few seconds to wake, and you go in the moment it does.

If you would rather play against the bots, there is FARM: SOLO in Settings. Your own records still count. The daily board and the chores do not, because those are public and they pay in coins.

If something goes wrong

Lose your connection mid-game and the game hangs on for a few seconds while it finds its way back, and the farm keeps your animal standing there in the meantime. Get back inside the window and you carry on with the same size, the same score and the same hat.

The screen after you die has a REPORT button, for a name or a way of behaving that is out of order.