Lasso Catch

How to play Lasso Catch

Lasso Catch is a lasso drawing game about patience and a steady hand. A garden full of glowing fireflies drifts around the screen in red, blue, green and, later, purple and pink. Your finger or mouse is a rope: draw a loop around a group of fireflies and, if they are all the same colour, you catch the whole group at once. The more fireflies in a single loop, the bigger your multiplier. The round lasts 90 seconds, so every loop counts.

1. Press Play and look for clusters of fireflies that share a colour.
2. Press down next to a cluster and draw around it in one stroke.
3. Close the loop by crossing your own line or by lifting near the white start dot.
4. Three or more fireflies of one colour are caught; anything else scatters.
5. Avoid the black bombs. Looping one costs five seconds and frightens the swarm.
6. When the clock reaches zero your score is final and your best is saved.

Tips for bigger catches

• Wait for the swarm. Fireflies of the same colour drift towards each other. Waiting two seconds for a group of five is worth far more than three quick catches of three.
• Draw tight shapes. A loop doesn't have to be round. Squeeze it around a group and snake past fireflies of other colours.
• Cross your line to finish fast. A small figure-of-eight crossing closes the lasso instantly, before the fireflies wander out.
• Mind the rope. The little bar under your finger shows how much rope is left. Huge spirals run out.
• Watch the bombs move. Bombs drift slowly. Draw your loop on the far side of a group if a bomb is close.
• Use bonus seconds. Every firefly after the third in one loop adds a second to the clock, so big catches let you play longer.

How the difficulty builds

Each round starts calm, with three colours and a single bomb. As the clock runs, fireflies fly faster and more bombs roll in, up to five at once. After 30 seconds a fourth colour joins the garden and after a minute a fifth, which makes pure single-colour groups rarer. Good players adapt: early on you can afford to wait for big swarms, late in the round you take the catches that are offered and keep well away from the bombs.

Why lasso games are so satisfying

Drawing a loop around things is one of the oldest gestures in computing: it's how you select a group of objects in almost every drawing app. Lasso Catch turns that everyday gesture into a reflex game. It rewards planning (which group is worth chasing?), precision (can you squeeze around a blue firefly without catching it?) and calm under time pressure. A round takes about a minute and a half, which makes it an ideal quick break, and because the score multiplier grows so fast there is always a bigger catch to aim for next time.

Scoring at a glance

Because the multiplier is the number of fireflies minus two, the score grows very quickly with the size of a catch:

• 3 fireflies: 3 × 10 × 1 = 30 points
• 4 fireflies: 4 × 10 × 2 = 80 points
• 5 fireflies: 5 × 10 × 3 = 150 points and +2 seconds
• 6 fireflies: 6 × 10 × 4 = 240 points and +3 seconds
• 8 fireflies: 8 × 10 × 6 = 480 points and +5 seconds

One six-firefly loop is worth eight catches of three. That's the heart of the game: greed against the clock and the bombs.

More drawing games

For a pure test of line control, try Draw a Perfect Circle. If you like gesture games, Balloon Symbol Pop has you drawing symbols to burst balloons, and Speed Draw challenges you to get doodles recognised by an AI against the clock.