Quake

Faults sit between plates around a ring, each showing only a coarse risk band, you can't see exact stress. Push plates together or pull them apart to shape the landforms that grow, and trigger controlled slips to bleed off building stress. Survive as long as you can; a magnitude-9 rupture ends the run.

• Stress is hidden, read the risk ring filling toward red
• Pushing builds mountains; pulling opens rifts
• Slip while the risk is amber, never let it reach red

• Desktop: click a fault to select it, use Push/Pull and Controlled slip buttons (or +/- keys)
• Phone & tablet: tap a fault and tap the on-screen action buttons

• Daily: one shared seeded tectonic ring
• Practice: endless new layouts

• Slip faults early and often rather than waiting for the risk ring to fill
• Spread your attention, a neglected fault is the one that ruptures
• Use plate motion to grow landforms only when stress is safely low

Quake is a plate-tectonics game about managing hidden fault stress in real time, building intuition for why and where earthquakes strike.

• Skills: plate tectonics, faults and stress, earthquakes, earth science
• Best for: roughly grades 6–11 (ages 11–16)
• For parents & teachers: makes the build-up and release of fault stress tangible.

Pushing plates together and pulling them apart to grow landforms, with faults showing only a coarse risk band, is plate tectonics with the uncertainty left in.

Hiding the exact stress is the original honesty.

That is the real state of the science. Elastic-rebound theory explains why faults store strain and release it suddenly, but accumulated stress cannot be measured directly at depth — which is precisely why earthquakes are forecast as probabilities over decades rather than predicted as events.

Quake is an original plate-tectonics game about managing hidden fault stress in real time. It's free to play in your browser, no sign-up needed.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.