User guide

Everything Blobbu does, in one place: how to hatch one, how to bring one back, battles and the Gauntlet, printing, the mini games, and how to run the arcade cabinet. Short version: a Blobbu is a little creature that is its link — no accounts, no sign-up, nothing stored on a server.

Meet your Blobbu

Answer the quiz (it's a personality quiz, not a test — there are no wrong answers) and a Blobbu hatches: one of a kind, made from your answers. Give it a name. What you get:

• Its card, with its picture, its stats (Charm, Chaos, Focus, Snack drive, Sass, Hallucination), and its No. — the card number printed on real trading cards, except this one is made from the Blobbu itself, so the same Blobbu always has the same number.
• Its link (blobbu.net/b/…) and a short code you can type. The link doesn't point at the Blobbu; the link is the Blobbu. Anyone who opens it meets exactly your creature, forever, even if this site forgets everything — there's nothing to forget.
• A QR code that opens the link, for printing on the card and stickers.

Keeping one: on the home page, the My Blobbus tab keeps the ones you've hatched or met on this device, so you can reopen them without the link. Apart from a cabinet's opt-in local record (see Setting up a cabinet), that's the only thing the site keeps; it lives in your browser, and the Menu has storage, backup and restore for it.

Bringing a Blobbu back

Open its link, scan its QR code, or type its code on the home page. Brought-in Blobbus can do everything a freshly hatched one can: battle, run the Gauntlet, play the games, print. If a Blobbu won an honor somewhere, the honor travels in its link too — see Battles.

Battles

Two Blobbus meet, the announcer calls it blow by blow, and the stats decide — the same two Blobbus under the same conditions always battle the same way, because the battle is worked out from the creatures themselves, not rolled fresh. Battle a friend's Blobbu by bringing theirs in, or take on the house in the arcade. Win against the house champion and your Blobbu earns an honor that rides along in its link and prints on its card.

The Gauntlet

Five challengers, one ladder, in the arcade. Your Blobbu starts with six hearts, keeps what's left between rungs, and gets one back per win; challengers have three. The ladder is Today's ladder — the same five for everyone, all day. Retire between rungs whenever you like and print a sticker showing how far you got. Clear all five and your Blobbu ascends: same creature, same stats, with the shine to prove it — the ascension prints on its card and stickers.

The Gauntlet's scoring is the ladder itself — the rung you reached, the hearts you kept — shown on the retire sticker and on the session receipt. By default nothing is kept between visits. A cabinet's operator can switch on a local record (see Setting up a cabinet): then the cabinet remembers each Blobbu's battle wins and losses and its Gauntlet best, in that cabinet's browser only, and shows the line at the hub. It never leaves the machine, and the operator can clear it.

Today's Blobbu, Today's Run

Every day has its own Blobbu — the same for everyone, all day — on the home page's Today's Blobbu tab. The arcade runs on the same idea: the Gauntlet ladder, the mini games' waves, screens, walls and courses are all dealt from the day, so everyone who plays today plays the same game. Come back tomorrow for a fresh deal.

Printing

Blobbu is made to be printed. From a Blobbu's card you can print:

• The trading card — 2.5 × 3.5 inches, front and back: picture, stats and No. on the front; its code, QR and story on the back. If it was hatched at a named cabinet or during an event, that prints on the front too.
• Stickers — a 5 × 5 inch sheet sticker and a die-cut shape, with the Blobbu's stamps: NO AI CONSULTED, IT'S FOR FUN, ZERO HOMEWORK, and the rest of the family.
• Score stickers after a mini game, showing the score and the run's details.
• Gauntlet stickers when you retire or clear, showing the rung reached.
• A session receipt in the arcade: the whole visit — games, scores, battles, the Gauntlet — with the take-home code at the bottom.

Printing is always the player's own button press, and downloads come with a small watermark. What an arcade cabinet offers to print is the operator's choice — see Setting up a cabinet.

The mini games

Six games, all in the arcade, all played by your Blobbu (its stats flavour how each game feels — a little, never how strong it is). Every game has three hearts, and snacks are the score: catch them in a row to build a chain worth ×2 from five in a row and ×3 from ten. Power-ups fall as you play; each game has its own set, listed with it. Scores print as score stickers.

Blobbu Blaster

Your Blobbu flies at the bottom; pop the Grumblobs, catch the snacks they drop. Every fifth wave brings a Big Grumblo. Move with the arrows or W A S D; Z, Space or Enter fire. Power-ups: Spread, Rapid, Magnet, Shield, and rarely a Heart.

Blobbu Bubble

One screen of platforms. Blow a bubble at a Waddler or a Hopper to trap it, then touch the bubble to pop it into a snack — wait too long and it bursts out angrier. You can jump up through platforms, walk off one side to come back on the other, and fall through the bottom to drop in from the top. Arrows move, up jumps, fire blows bubbles. Power-ups: Speed shoes, Long bubble, Big bubble, Star burst, Heart.

Blobbu Pop

Bubbles hang from the ceiling. Aim along the dotted guide and fire: match three of a colour to pop them, and anything only held up by what popped drops — catch the drops as snacks. Don't let the pile cross the foul line. Left and right aim, fire shoots, down swaps your two bubbles, up + left/right slides the launcher; on touch, drag to aim and let go. Special bubbles: Rainbow, Bomb, Guide, Raise.

Blobbu Breaker

Your Blobbu is the ball. Slide the paddle along the bottom, launch your Blobbu with fire, and bounce it through the wall of Grumblob blocks; broken blocks drop snacks. Let it fall past the paddle, lose a heart. Power-ups: Wide, Slow ball, Shield (the floor bounces the ball back, once), Heart.

Blobbu Serpent

Your Blobbu leads a chain of little blobs around a grid. Steer with the arrows — there's no fire button — and eat snacks to grow; each screen asks for a set number. Walls, the dark blocks from the second screen, and your own tail cost a heart. Power-ups: Slow, Shrink, Shield, Heart. Mind the purple decoy snacks: harmless, worth nothing.

Blobbu Dash

A one-button runner. Tap fire (or up) to jump the Grumblob blocks, hold it to float a little farther. Snacks sit on the ground and in arcs over the blocks; stumble and you lose a heart and the chain, and the course only gets faster. Power-ups: Wings (a second jump in mid-air), Magnet, Shield (smash through one block), Heart.

Blobbu Mimic

A memory game. Four pads sit round your Blobbu — up, right, down and left, each with its own colour, arrow and note. Your Blobbu points at them in a sequence (WATCH); then it's your turn: press the same pads in the same order with the arrows, or tap them. Copy it all and the next round adds one more step, shown a little faster, with a bonus for the round. A wrong pad, or taking too long (the bar shows the time left), costs one of three hearts and the round plays again. Each correct press counts on the snack chain. Today's Run: the same sequence for everyone all day. Focus gives you a little longer to answer; Charm shows the steps a touch slower. No power-ups.

Blobbu Blitz

A shift of 25 tiny games, about four seconds each. Each one flashes a word — Pop it!, Catch!, Dodge!, Mash!, Balance!, Slice!, Inflate!, Count!, Odd one!, Freeze!, Stop it!, Don't press!, the one-breath remixes of the other games, and the party shelf (Tug!, Hot potato!, Shell game!, Match!, Crane!, Whack!, Land it!, Exactly 3!, Race!, Defuse!, Dice!, Same same!, Fishing!, Gumball!, High five!, Piñata!, Karaoke!, The wave!), and the "are you a bot?" set (Traffic lights!, Buses! — leave the Blobbus alone — Not a robot!, Wavy word!, Slide it!, Rotate!, Expires!, Bridges!, Upside down!, Two words!, Nudge!, Audio check!, Dodgy box!) with a few cabinet remixes (Hatch!, Selfie!, One rung!, Sticker peel!, Print queue!), and the AI set (Autocomplete!, Hallucination!, As an AI...!, Prompt it!, Training data!, GPU heat!, Token limit!, RLHF!, Context window!, Temperature!, Sycophant!, Rate limit!, Deterministic!, Embeddings!, Fine-tune!, Chain of thought!, Jailbreak!, Benchmark!; long answers come as rows, and up and down move through them), and second helpings (Top it!, Peek!, Shadow!, Tiptoe!, Candles!, Untie!, Stack!, Thread!, Four bounces!, Spotlight!, Overfit!, Souvenir!, Photo!) — 85 in all — on the grids, arrows move the cursor in all four directions — and how to play it: press, move, hold, mash, pick or wait. Win it or miss it at the buzzer; the bar along the bottom is the clock. Every five games it speeds up (SPEED UP!), a miss costs one of four hearts, and game 25 is a boss, one of five: the Demo Reel (three of this shift's games back to back, all three or none), the Encore (your first game again, at full speed), Full CAPTCHA! (the checkbox, the squares, then the wavy word, all three or none), The Interview! (three picking questions; miss one and the shift ends, whatever hearts you have left) or Patch Notes! (a plain Catch!, but the controls were updated: left is right and right is left). Your score is the number you clear. In a two-player session, take turns from the game picker, as with the other games — or, on a cabinet with two sticks, play the same shift side by side.

The arcade cabinet

The arcade is the same site at blobbu.net/arcade, made for a machine people walk up to. The visit goes: the splash (PRESS START) → how many players → hatch a Blobbu (one press: a brand-new random Blobbu with its own name) or bring one by code or scan → the hub → battles, the Gauntlet, the mini games, printing → the take-home screen with the code to bring the Blobbu back anywhere. Two players take turns; whoever's Blobbu is picked plays. A Tournament, on cabinets whose operator switches it on, takes 3 to 8 players: each gets a Blobbu in turn (hatch or bring), then the bracket runs ordinary battles — the first players in get byes when the numbers don't come out even — until one champion is left. Battles are decided by the two Blobbus alone, so the same pair always ends the same way. At the end the champion can print a winner sticker, every entrant's link is listed as text, and the take-home screen shows the champion and the runner-up. On a cabinet set up with two sticks and buttons, two players play every mini game at once instead: side by side on a split screen with the same waves (or the same Blitz shift), or together on Blobbu Bubble's one screen, each with their own hearts and score. Player 1 plays with W A S D and Z or Space (or the first stick), Player 2 with the arrows and Enter (or the second stick). The higher score wins, and the winner's Blobbu takes the score screen and its sticker.

• Left alone, the cabinet tidies itself: after the idle time the operator set, it returns to the splash. Leave the splash alone longer and it starts playing demos of the games by itself, and shows the day's best mini-game scores at this cabinet (the top three; kept only in the page's memory, gone on reload).
• Print didn't come out? The splash has a button for exactly that: bring the Blobbu and you're straight at the print screen, no new visit needed.
• The corner controls (bottom-left) handle sound, fullscreen, help and exit. Keys work everywhere: the games' own section of the Help lists them all, and M is sound, H is help, F is fullscreen.

Setting up a cabinet

On any device, open blobbu.net/arcade?setup. Every choice is written into the arcade link the page builds at the bottom — nothing is stored on the device, apart from the Local record if you switch it on — so bookmark that link, or open it on the cabinet itself. The settings:

• Print options: which prints players may make (card, stickers, score stickers, the session receipt, and the rest).
• Idle time: how long without a touch before the cabinet returns to the splash (battles always get at least two minutes).
• Sound starting off, No music (the cabinet's chiptune loops stay off; the sound effects stay on), and the theme (auto, dark or light).
• Cabinet name: prints on cards and stickers as “Hatched at …”.
• Event name: for a tournament or a party — the Gauntlet wears it on its ladder and hub tile, its sticker's band carries it, and prints carry it next to the cabinet name.
• Language: English or Spanish. Spanish covers the cabinet's own words — splash, buttons, Gauntlet, print screens; the quiz, the personas, the battles and the prints stay in English.
• Offer tournaments: adds Tournament to the player count. Off unless ticked.
• High-score table: keeps each mini game's ten best runs on this cabinet (the Blobbu's name, the score and the date) in this browser only, and shows them on the splash and the score screen. It is never sent anywhere; Clear the high scores empties it.
• Two sticks and buttons: tick it when the cabinet is wired for two players. Two-player sessions then play the mini games at the same time, and Cabinet keys gains Player 2's five actions (standard: the arrows and Enter, and the second gamepad; Player 1 keeps W A S D, Z and Space). Leave it off on a one-stick machine: two players take turns there, because a split screen can't be played with one stick.
• Cabinet keys: the keys the mini games listen to. Pick an action (Up, Down, Left, Right, Fire), press Set, then press the key or push the joystick you want for it — the page captures it, and the binding travels in the link. A captured key is taken from any other action it had. Menus always keep the standard keys (the setup page lists them for wiring a button encoder), and X / Esc always pause, so a binding can't lock you out. Gamepads and USB arcade sticks work too: press any of their buttons once so the browser sees them, then Set captures a pad button or a push of the stick like a key. With no bindings, the stick moves, Select or Start pauses (and goes back in menus, as does button 2), and every other button fires or presses.
• Blitz microgame tester: pick any Blobbu Blitz microgame and a speed, then Play it: that one microgame comes round again and again, a fresh layout each time, with nothing at stake and a running tally of clears and misses. It's for checking a microgame is fair before players meet it. The cabinet keys and sticks work here; X or Esc stops.
• Local record: keep a per-Blobbu record on this cabinet — hub battle wins and losses, Gauntlet runs, best rung and clears — stored only in this browser and shown at the hub. Off unless you tick it; the setup page shows how many Blobbus have a record and can clear it. The record lives in the cabinet's own browser, so open the setup page on the cabinet itself to clear it (unticking the box stops new entries but keeps the old ones).
• Print a test card: prints today's champion's card, front and back, to prove the printer before a player sits down.

House rules

• No AI. No accounts. No tracking. No cookies, no analytics, nothing that would need a privacy notice; a Blobbu is worked out from its code by rules, not generated.
• Nothing is stored on a server. Your Blobbus live in their links; the keepsakes list lives in your browser; the cabinet's daily board lives in the page until it's reloaded.
• Deterministic. Same answers, same Blobbu. Same Blobbus, same battle. Same day, same ladder, same games. If two people tell you different stories about the same Blobbu, one of them is fibbing.
• Tips go to the human who made it, via the Menu, and are entirely optional — the Blobbus are free either way.

Release by release, see What's new.