Stack smooth river stones into a teetering tower while the breeze nudges it, patience over haste.
Drag river stones one at a time onto a growing cairn. Each stone shifts the balance, and every few seconds a breath of wind nudges the stack. Place carefully and your cairn holds; finished towers line up along the shoreline gallery.
Cairn is original; the practice is ancient. A cairn is a stack of stones built as a marker — for a route, a summit, a grave — and people have been making them for as long as there have been paths worth remembering.
Its modern relative is rock balancing, where the stack is built for its own sake and the achievement is that it stands at all. This game takes that version: nothing is being marked, and the tower exists only while it holds.
The wind is what makes it a game rather than a sculpture. Every stone shifts the balance, and a breath of air arrives every few seconds to test what you have built — so the decision is always whether to place one more, which is the same decision the real practice turns on.
Cairn is an original meditative balancing toy in the relaxing physics-sandbox genre, a free browser game about the quiet focus of stacking stones.