Tear around a maze collecting every flag while a pack of red cars closes in.
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How to play
You drive a scrolling maze collecting every flag while red cars hunt you down. The cars chase rather than patrol, so there is no safe pattern to learn — only routes that keep you ahead of them. A smokescreen dropped behind you briefly stuns anything close, and touching either a red car or a rock costs a life.
Collect every flag on the level to clear it.
Every third flag rotates the entire maze ninety degrees — the route you memorised is now facing a different way.
Fuel drains constantly and much faster while you are smoking; a single smoke drop costs 6 of your 100.
Running dry does not end the run, it slows you from full speed to a crawl — roughly a quarter of your normal pace, with the cars unaffected.
Rocks block whole cells and kill on contact, so the maze itself is as dangerous as the pursuit.
Controls
Desktop: arrow keys or WASD to drive, Space to drop a smokescreen
Phone & tablet: tap controls supported on touch devices
Tips & strategy
Plan only three flags ahead. The maze rotates on every third pickup, so a longer route than that is planning around a map that will not exist.
Treat smoke as fuel rather than as a weapon. Each drop costs 6 fuel and the drain rate multiplies while it is active, so two panicked smokes can be the reason you finish the level crawling.
Running out of fuel is worse than taking a risk. At crawl speed the cars close at roughly four times your pace and nothing you do outruns them.
Collect the flags nearest the rocks first, while you still have the speed to pull away from a mistake.
After a rotation, stop and re-read the maze before moving. A confident wrong turn into a rock ends the run faster than a slow correct one.
Origins
Flag Rally draws on Rally-X, released by Namco in 1980: a scrolling maze seen from above, ten flags to collect, and red cars that chase you rather than patrolling a fixed route.
Two things made it stand out. It carried a radar panel showing the whole course, so you plan a route instead of discovering the maze by dying in it; and it had continuous background music at a time when arcade games mostly beeped. Your only weapon is a smokescreen that stalls a pursuer, and it burns fuel you need to finish, so every escape is borrowed against the clock.
About Flag Rally
Flag Rally is an original free browser take on the classic maze-chase collection racer, with Easy/Normal/Hard difficulty and a daily challenge. No download required.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
