Canopy Clash

How To Play Canopy Clash

Chimps take turns lobbing coconuts across the jungle. Knock the other chimps down to zero health and they wave a white flag and sit out. The last side still in wins.

Throwing

Pull back and let go. Press anywhere on the play area and drag away from where you want to throw, like a slingshot. The further you pull, the harder you throw. Let go to throw. A very short pull cancels.
Fine-tune. Use ↺ ↻ to tilt your aim and − + to change power one step at a time (hold to repeat), then tap Throw.
Learn from your last throw. A faint dotted line shows where your previous throw went, so you can adjust a little each time.
Watch the wind. The arrow at the top shows which way it blows and how hard. It changes every turn, and it pushes your throw along with it.
Look around. The map under the play area shows the whole jungle. Drag or tap it to look somewhere else. Tap the play area during a throw to speed it up.

The ground and the trees

Coconuts blast holes in the ground, and loose dirt falls into them. If the ground under a chimp gives way, it drops, and a long fall hurts.
Leaves catch anything falling onto them, but your own throws pass up through them. Sheltering under a tree is real cover.
Trunks are too thin to stop a throw. A tree cut off from the ground falls over.

What you can throw

Coconut: your everyday throw, and you never run out.
Durian: splits into spiky pieces at the top of its arc, spraying a wide area.
Banana boomerang: curves back toward you in flight. It's good for dropping behind a hill.
Seed pod: grows a leafy tree where it lands. Drop one near your feet for cover.
Termite nest: eats every leaf and trunk nearby. Use it when someone is hiding under a tree.
Beehive: leaves a swarm that stings anyone inside it at the start of the next few turns.
Monsoon cloud: changes the wind, and you keep your turn. Tap it twice to use it.
Scout bird: for the rest of your turn it flies your aim and shows exactly where your throw will land. It doesn't come back. Tap it twice to use it.

After you throw a special, your hand goes back to a coconut, so you won't waste one by accident.

Quick duel

One round against a Sloth (easy), a Toucan (medium) or a Gorilla (hard), or pass the phone to a friend. Both sides get the same kit. Choose your opponent in the settings.

Campaign

You against the troop. You start on the left and throw first. Every opponent on the right is aiming at you.
Your rank sets the challenge. Win comfortably and you climb two ranks, win narrowly and you climb one, lose and you drop two. Higher ranks bring more opponents (up to four), sharper aim and better-equipped opponents.
New things appear as you go. Every few battles something new turns up: durians, leaf huts, bananas, termites, beehives, gales and monsoons.
Earn bananas. You earn one banana for every point of damage you deal. A win adds more for each opponent who resigned, for the victory itself, and for the health you have left. Higher ranks pay more.
Losing is no disaster. You keep your kit and your bananas and try the same jungle again, against slightly easier opponents. Whatever you threw is used up either way.
Leave a battle. Open the settings and choose Wave the white flag. It counts as a loss.

The shop

Supplies: buy durians, bananas, seed pods, termites, beehives, monsoon clouds and scout birds, up to nine of each.
Stronger throws: upgrade any weapon up to level 4 for bigger blasts, more durian pieces, bigger trees, hungrier termites and longer stings.
Bark armor: each level takes a bit off every hit you take.
Mango breakfast: each level gives you more health at the start of every battle.

Replays

Every campaign battle has an ID, like 2-27-r14-1234abcd. Open Replays to play any past battle again, or type in an ID someone shares with you. Replays lend you your kit, so nothing is used up, and they don't earn bananas or change your rank.

Tips

Throw high when the wind is calm. Throw low and hard when it's strong.
Plant a tree on the side your opponents throw from, so its leaves hang between you and them.
Take down the sharpest opponent first. It's usually the one listed at the top.
Save the scout bird for the throw that matters most.

Settings (⚙️)

Tap the settings button to open the Canopy Clash settings panel. The game pauses while it's open, and tapping Done takes you back to where you were.

Quick duel opponent

Choose who you face in a quick duel:

Sloth (easy): a shaky hand and not much respect for the wind.
Toucan (medium): reads the wind and aims with care.
Gorilla (hard): rarely misses, and knows when to use its specials.
A friend (pass & play): two people take turns on the same phone.

Your choice is remembered, follows you to your other devices, and applies from the next quick duel you start. It doesn't change the campaign, where your rank decides who you face.

Wave the white flag

This option appears only during a battle. It lets you leave the battle by resigning.

In the campaign it counts as a loss. You keep your kit and your bananas, and you're paid for any damage you've already dealt. Your rank drops as it would for any lost battle, and anything you've already thrown stays used up.
In a replay nothing is lost, because replays never cost or earn anything.
In a quick duel, the chimp whose turn it is resigns and the other side wins.

To avoid resigning by accident, it takes two taps. The first tap asks you to confirm, and the second resigns.

Reset a campaign

The button names the campaign you're playing, for example Reset Campaign 1. It starts that one campaign over from the very beginning and leaves your other campaigns alone. It permanently erases:

your bananas,
everything you've bought: supplies, weapon upgrades, bark armor and mango breakfasts,
your rank and best rank,
your battle number and your list of past battles for replay.

You start again at rank 1 with the starter kit of one durian, one seed pod, one termite nest and one scout bird. The campaign keeps its name. Your quick duel choice isn't affected, and neither are the sound and dark mode settings. If you're in the middle of a campaign battle or a replay, it ends and you return to the home screen.

A reset can't be undone, so it also takes two taps. The first tap warns you that all progress and bananas will be lost, and the second resets.

A battle ID you noted down still works after a reset. You can type it into Replays to play that battle again.

To remove a campaign altogether, or to start another one alongside it, use Campaigns on the home screen instead. A campaign can be deleted there as long as it isn't the one you're playing.

Sound, dark mode and pause

These are set with the site's own controls rather than in the game's panel. Canopy Clash follows them: muting silences every sound effect, dark mode turns the jungle to night, and pausing freezes the battle exactly where it is. If you leave in the middle of a battle, it's saved, and it picks up paused when you come back.

Contact: Feel free to contact us with any bugs, complaints, or requests.

Release Date: September 28, 2026

History

Artillery Games

Few video game ideas are as old, or as long-lived, as this one: two sides take turns, each picks an angle and a power, and a single shot arcs across the screen toward the other. Canopy Clash belongs to a family of games that is more than fifty years old.

Numbers on a teletype (1970s)

The first artillery games had no graphics at all. On the time-sharing computers of the early 1970s, players typed in an elevation, and the computer printed back where the shell landed: too short, too long, or a direct hit. Mike Forman's War 3, written in the FOCAL language, was ported to several versions of BASIC over the decade. Tom Kloos wrote Gunner in 1973. Programs like these travelled as printed listings in books and magazines, and people typed them in by hand. For many new programmers, a gunnery game was one of the first things they ever ran.

Arcs you could see (late 1970s–early 1980s)

Once home computers and consoles could draw, the shell's path finally appeared on screen. Atari's Human Cannonball (1979) swapped the war for a circus: you fired a performer from a cannon into a water tower. Apple II owners got graphical versions such as Super Artillery in 1980. Artillery Duel, published by Bally in 1982 for the Astrocade and brought to other systems the following year, put two cannons on either side of a mountain. That became the basic shape of the genre.

The golden age of shareware (1991)

1991 was a landmark year. Wendell Hicken's Scorched Earth, a shareware game for MS-DOS, gave players a jagged, fully destructible landscape. It added wind that changed every turn, dirt that slid down into craters, a shop full of outrageous weapons, and matches for up to ten players, often crowded around a single keyboard. It is still the game most people picture when they think of the genre, and it is the direct ancestor of Canopy Clash.

The same year, a much simpler game reached millions of people almost by accident. Gorillas, included with QBasic in MS-DOS 5.0, had two giant gorillas on a city skyline hurling explosive bananas at each other. It was a sample program, meant to show off the language, but it became many people's first taste of both programming and artillery games. A jungle game full of chimps and fruit owes it a nod.

Teams, worms and slingshots (1995 onward)

In 1995 Team17 released Worms for the Amiga. Each player commanded a small squad on deformable islands, and the arsenal grew ever sillier. The series turned artillery into a party game and has been running ever since. On the PC, Pocket Tanks (2001) and later ShellShock Live (2015) kept the classic tank duel alive, with long lists of collectible weapons.

Then, in December 2009, Rovio's Angry Birds took the core idea of pulling back, judging the arc and letting go, and put it on touchscreens. It turned the genre into one of the most-played games on phones. The slingshot drag it made familiar is how you throw in Canopy Clash.

Why it lasts

The formula has hardly changed in half a century because it doesn't need to. One shot, one arc and one moment of waiting to see where it lands is easy to learn and hard to master. Each era has added its own twist: pictures, then wind, then shops, teams and touchscreens. Canopy Clash adds a few of its own. Leaves catch falling shells, termites bring down the cover, and the opponents grow sharper exactly as fast as you do. Underneath, it's still the same old question: how high, how hard, and which way is the wind blowing?

Behind the Scenes

Canopy Clash: Trouble in the Treetops

If you ever played Scorched Earth, the early-'90s DOS classic, you remember how it went. Tanks sat on a ragged hillside and took turns picking an angle and a power. Then you watched the shell arc across the sky and hoped the wind was feeling generous. Canopy Clash is our jungle take on that idea. The tanks are chimps, the shells are coconuts, and nobody gets hurt. A chimp who runs out of health just sits down and waves a white flag.

Pull back, let fly

Canopy Clash is built for a phone held upright. Press anywhere on the play area, pull back like a slingshot and let go. The jungle is three screens wide, so the camera follows your coconut in flight, and a map underneath shows the whole battlefield at a glance. A faint dotted line remembers your last throw, so you can nudge your aim a little each turn and walk your shots onto the target, just like the old days.

The wind changes every turn. The ground gives way where coconuts land, loose dirt tumbles into craters, and a chimp standing on the edge may find itself taking the quick way down.

A jungle full of tricks

Coconuts never run out, but the jungle has more to offer:

Durians split into spiky pieces at the top of their arc.
Banana boomerangs curve back in flight, which is handy for landing behind a hill.
Beehives leave a swarm that keeps stinging for a few turns.
Monsoon clouds change the wind when it's working against you.
Scout birds fly your aim and show you exactly where a throw will land. They don't come back, so use them wisely.

Our favourite trick is the canopy itself. Leaves catch whatever falls onto them, but your own throws punch straight up through them. A seed pod dropped at your feet grows a leafy hut over your head, and it will soak up a coconut or two. Of course, your opponents have termite nests, which eat through every leaf and trunk nearby and bring the whole tree down. Plant, chew, replant. The battles got a lot more interesting once the trees started fighting back.

Two ways to play

Quick duel is a single round with the same kit on both sides. Take on a Sloth, a Toucan or a Gorilla, or pass the phone to a friend.

The campaign is you against the whole troop. You earn bananas for every hit and spend them between battles in the shop. There you can stock up on supplies, upgrade your weapons, put on some bark armor or eat a hearty mango breakfast before the next fight.

The campaign doesn't follow a fixed script. It keeps a rank that follows how well you're actually playing. Win comfortably and you climb, lose and you slip back a little. As your rank rises, more opponents join the fight, up to four at once, and they aim sharper and carry better gear. Every few battles something new turns up in their hands or the weather. The aim is simple: whatever your skill, you should win about two battles in three. That's enough to feel good, and never so many that it gets dull.

Every campaign battle also has a short battle ID. Share it with a friend and they'll get the very same jungle, the same opponents and the same winds, then see if they can do better.

Under the hood

Everything in Canopy Clash is drawn and heard without a single image or sound file. The jungle is made one pixel at a time, the chimps are drawn in code, and every boom, buzz and sad-trombone resignation is synthesized as you play. The opponents plan every throw with the same physics you're throwing with, then add a shaky hand to match their skill. When a Gorilla lands a coconut on your head, it earned it.

Canopy Clash is ready to play now. Mind the wind, and keep a seed pod handy.