CONFLUX — Two-Body Alignment Puzzle

What is CONFLUX — Two-Body Alignment Puzzle

CONFLUX puts two bodies on a single circular track. Sol, the gold one, and Luna, the cyan one, run the same ring at different angular speeds, printed in degrees per second along the bottom of the screen. Somewhere on that ring sits the Gate, a glowing arc about 25 degrees wide on an opening level and closer to 15 on the hardest. Your only control is a swap: a tap, a click or the space bar exchanges the two speeds instantly. Whoever was fast becomes slow, and the gap that was closing starts opening again. A level is won the moment both bodies are inside the Gate at once.

The white cross on the ring is the whole game in one mark: it shows where the two would meet if nothing changed. Swap, and it jumps elsewhere, because the gap now closes from the other side. When the cross turns green it sits inside the Gate and you only have to wait. The lock then slows time to about a third and measures two things: how tightly the pair converged, and how near the middle of the arc they did it. Ninety per cent or better is a PERFECT. Swaps are counted, five on the first level and two on the hardest, and the outer ring is your clock.

How to play

1. Watch the cross on the ring: it predicts where Sol and Luna will next meet at their current speeds, and it turns green when that meeting point falls inside the golden Gate.
2. Tap the board, click it or press the space bar to swap the two speeds; the gap between the bodies then closes from the opposite side and the cross jumps to a new point.
3. When both bodies enter the Gate together the alignment locks, time slows to about a third, and the game keeps the best reading taken over the next second and a half.
4. The Daily Challenge is five levels with unlimited retries at a falling value; Endless Run continues until three missed alignments spend your three lives.

Strategies that work

• Subtract the two speeds shown at the bottom and divide 360 by the result: that is the gap in seconds between one meeting and the next. Opening levels differ by roughly 26 degrees per second, so meetings arrive about every 14 seconds and an 18-second clock offers only one or two of them.
• Precision is 55 per cent how close the two bodies end up to each other and 45 per cent how close their midpoint lands to the centre of the Gate. Landing the cross anywhere in the arc still wins, but an edge hit caps you near GREAT; aim it at the small diamond mid-arc.
• Every unspent swap is worth 30 points when the level resolves, and a nearly full clock adds up to 80 more. One well-timed swap instead of three puts you around 60 points ahead before precision is counted, which is why waiting beats tapping to see what happens.
• The multiplier only starts on your second consecutive PERFECT: x1 first, then x1.25, x1.5, x1.75 and x2 from the fifth. A single GREAT resets it to nothing. Over the Daily's five levels, five clean PERFECTs beat one spectacular alignment followed by four untidy ones.
• The cross starts fading on Daily level three and keeps about a third of its brightness by level five; in Endless it fades from level six and bottoms out near level eleven. Count instead of looking: the interval between meetings never changes within a level.

A little history

CONFLUX was written for this site and has no older ancestor, but the arithmetic under it is ordinary celestial mechanics. Two bodies on one circle with different periods return to the same alignment at a fixed interval, the synodic period, and each conjunction lands a fixed step further round. Jupiter and Saturn meet about every 19.86 years, most recently on 21 December 2020, and each meeting falls roughly 117 degrees from the last, the slowly turning triangle Kepler drew as the trigon. The Moon's synodic month averages 29.53 days. CONFLUX keeps that arithmetic and adds what astronomers never had: a button that swaps the two speeds.

Frequently asked questions