How to play
Press the left or right arrow, or tap the left or right half of the screen, to change lane.
About Lane Dodger
Lane Dodger puts you on a three-lane road that never ends, in a car that never slows down. Red cars appear ahead in one lane or another. Change lanes to get around them. The game counts the metres as you go, and it keeps pressing the accelerator for you.
How to play
Your green car sits near the bottom of the screen. On a computer, press the left or right arrow key to move one lane across. On a phone or tablet, tap the left half of the screen to go left and the right half to go right. Each press moves you exactly one lane, and you cannot leave the road, so a press towards the kerb in an outside lane does nothing.
Other cars come down the road towards you. Touch one and you crash, the distance stops counting, and a tap or key press puts you back at the start. There are no lives and no second chances, so every run is a single clean attempt.
It gets faster, and busier
Two things change as you drive. The road speeds up steadily, so each car reaches you a little sooner than the one before. And they turn up more often. In the opening stretch a new car appears about once a second. Half a minute in, there are more than two a second, and the road ahead starts to look like a puzzle.
Reading the road
The best advice is to look up. Beginners stare at their own car and react when something is about to hit it. Better players watch the top third of the screen, where the traffic first appears, and make their move before there is any hurry.
The middle lane is your home. From the centre, either side is one press away. From an outside lane, the far side is two presses away, and at high speed there may not be time for two. Go out to the edge when you need to, then come back to the middle once you are clear.
Move early and move once. A lane change takes effect straight away, so there is no reason to wait until the last moment. Late changes are how you clip the rear corner of a car you thought you had passed. Your car is as long as the others, and you need the full length to be clear before you slide over.
Now and then three cars will arrive close together across all three lanes. They are never perfectly level, because they appear one at a time. Find the one furthest ahead or furthest behind and slip through the gap it leaves.
How far is far?
Two hundred metres is a decent opening run. Five hundred means your eyes have moved up the screen. Past a thousand you are driving mostly on instinct, and the lanes change under your fingers before you have really thought about it.
Quick to start, hard to stop
Lane Dodger needs two keys or two thumbs and no explanation. A run lasts from a few seconds to a few minutes. The steady rise in speed means you always crash while going faster than last time, which somehow makes it feel like progress.
It plays in the browser on phones and computers, free, with nothing to download.