What is Iron Thunder — One drag, one arc, one hundred missions
Iron Thunder is a side-on artillery puzzle played one shell at a time. You drag anywhere on the field: the line from your tank to your finger sets the barrel between 3 and 86 degrees, and the length of the drag sets the power — 240 screen pixels of stroke is a full charge. After that it is arithmetic. Gravity pulls down at 200 units per second squared while the wind pushes sideways at up to 65, on screen before you shoot and fixed for the whole mission.
There are 100 missions and a daily one. Shells are counted per mission and the ones left over decide everything: the total is combat points plus 80 a shell, and the stars follow the same count — three for two spare, two for one, one for none. A tank pays 100, plus 40 on patrol, 80 armoured, 140 elite; a truck 60, a radar 50, a barrel 30, TNT 25, a mine or a wooden wall 20. Barrels, TNT and mines go off in chains.
How to play
- Drag anywhere on the field to aim: direction sets the barrel, distance sets the power, and the ring around your hull fills from green to red. Let go to fire.
- Read the wind panel first: the number is its strength over ten and the arrows give its side. It never changes during a mission.
- One shell flies at a time. From mission 5 a machine answers each shot, two from mission 31, but your three hull points lose at most one per reply.
- Clear every tank to win; run out of shells and the mission fails. Scrap buys tanks and add-ons in the Garage: bigger blast, more armour, an extra shell, a longer preview.
Strategies that work
- Wind is an acceleration, not a shove, so the drift grows with the square of the flight time. At 6.5 a four-second lob lands 520 units downwind, more than half the field; a flat 1.5-second shot moves barely 70. Three arrows means: find the flattest line that clears the wall.
- The red cross marks where the preview stops, not where the shell lands. One dot is drawn per twentieth of a second of flight: 1.5 seconds of arc in mission 1, a quarter of a second in mission 100. Targeting AI adds six dots a level, the Falcon eight.
- Aim at the barrel, not the tank. Your shell bursts at radius 70 and reaches a hull 94 units off; a barrel bursts at 100 and reaches 124, and two targets are never closer than 85 apart — one barrel takes both, and if it lights TNT it lands the two hits an armoured tank needs.
- Against a patrol, kill the corridor instead of leading the tank. It walks 80 units either side of its start, so the run is 160 wide at most and a ground burst reaches 94. Watch one lap, mark the two turning points, drop the shell halfway between.
- Three stars want two shells still racked, so treat every chain as ammunition: from mission 57 there are 24 missions dealt exactly as many shells as hits to land, and only barrels and mines pay for stars there. To cancel a bad aim, drag back to the tank and release under eight per cent.
A little history
Turn-based artillery is one of the oldest families in games: two guns, a slope between them, and a duel settled by choosing an angle and a power and waiting to see where it fell. It outlived every generation of hardware because the interesting part was arithmetic, not reflexes. Iron Thunder was written for puzzle-me.com and pushes that family towards a puzzle rather than a duel. The wind does it: a constant sideways pull turns the parabola into a curve whose drift grows with the square of the time in the air.
Frequently asked questions
Is the daily challenge really the same for everyone?
Yes. The site runs the UTC date plus its own name through a 32-bit FNV-1a hash — 26 August 2026 gives 478805786 — and hands that integer to the generator: ground, targets, walls, patrols, barrels, TNT, mines, wind and shell count all come from it. The Garage is ignored, so everyone plays the base tank.
Can all 100 missions be cleared with the base tank?
Yes, and the game checks first: each mission is swept with 3,528 trajectories and every target must be reachable by at least 16 of them, or the level is repaired until it is. The tightest is mission 83's fourth machine, behind a 150-unit concrete wall: 988 of 213,864 simulated shots reach it, all lobs between 67 and 85 degrees.
Do I need to install anything, and does it work on a phone?
No install, no account: one page in the browser, mouse or finger. Power is measured in real screen pixels, so the 240-pixel stroke of a full charge gives a phone the same control as a desktop, and the sky is stretched above the field so a five-second lob stays visible.
