Read the verse.
Land the blow.
The night Troy falls, one Trojan bars the gate — and the fight is narrated in epic verse that keeps stopping on a word: POW. CLANG. WHIFF. Type it, tap it, or shout it into your mic, and what you just read plays out in the picture. Miss it, and the verse turns on you.
The duel at the gate
Odyssey Stick Fight
Read the verse. Land the blow.
Audio starts after you pick a mode. Esc pauses · M mutes.
Arm your voice
Asking for the microphone…
Space / Enter to skip
Final score 0
The verse pauses
Best with a keyboard — Tap mode is yours today.
Three Books, one duel. The verse sets the scene, the word is your cue — land it inside the window. Perfect timing hits harder. Headphones help Speak mode, not required.
Premeditated, but dynamic
The choreography is authored like a movie fight — what's decided late is whether your take lands. That part is yours.
- 1
Pick a mode.
Type on a keyboard, Tap on touch, or Speak into the mic. Every mode fights the same duel.
- 2
Read the verse, hit the word.
Each beat telegraphs in the picture while the verse sets it up. When the word slams in, answer before the window shuts — sooner is a PERFECT.
- 3
Survive three Books.
Miss and the Trojan answers back. Keep your health through Book III and the horse will watch you finish it.
Keyboard, thumb, or lungs
Type
Spell the word letter by letter — fastest fingers take the round. A couple of fumbles are forgiven; a sloppy word still lands, just not perfectly.
Tap
Three big word-buttons appear under the stage — one true, two decoys. The default on phones and tablets. Wrong button, wrong ending.
Speak
Shout the word and the blow lands on your voice — the game reads loudness locally, in the moment. After each round, an optional ~40 MB in-browser model checks whether you shouted the verse as written and pays a fidelity bonus. Honest limits: it judges the round after it ends, never mid-fight, and your audio never leaves the tab.
Why tonight? Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens July 17, and the oldest war story going is suddenly everyone's story again. This game isn't affiliated with the film and uses nothing from it — it's built from Homer, who is gloriously public domain. Odysseus dueling Deiphobus while the horse looms is straight out of the old verse. Consider this our popcorn.
Stick fight FAQ
Is the game free, and is anything uploaded?
Free, no signup. The whole fight runs in this tab — the canvas, your keystrokes, your taps, and your microphone audio all stay in the browser. There is no server keeping score and nothing about how you play is sent anywhere.
Does Speak mode send my voice anywhere?
No. During the fight the game only measures loudness, locally, to feel the moment you shout. After each round an optional speech model can judge whether you said the written words — that model is a one-time ~40 MB download from a public CDN and it runs entirely in this tab. Model download is not audio upload; your voice never leaves the browser.
Do I need a microphone?
No. Type and Tap are first-class ways to fight — Speak is a toggle for the brave. If the mic is missing, blocked, or busy, the game says so and offers the keyboard path instead of blocking you.
Why words instead of buttons?
Because reading is faster than reaching. The word you read is the move that lands — same thesis as our dictation app: your voice and your reading outrun your fingers. Shouting POW at a stick figure is that thesis with a crested helmet on.
Is this affiliated with the Odyssey film?
No. The game is built from Homer — Odysseus, Deiphobus, and the horse are almost three thousand years past copyright. The film is simply why tonight felt like the right night to ship a Trojan stick fight.
Does it work on phones?
Yes — Tap mode puts three big word-buttons under the stage and is picked automatically on touch screens. Type mode wants a hardware keyboard, and Speak mode works anywhere a mic does.
Fights, words, and why your voice wins
Shouting POW at nine in the morning
How the Odyssey became a stick fight you yell at — Xiao Xiao nostalgia, movie-fight choreography, and one honest note about the shout. The making-of.
How a typing test humbled its maker
Twenty-eight runs, a lifetime-best 62 WPM — then the speaking round hit 214. The whole story.
Your voice never needed the cloud
Speak mode judges your shouting without uploading a syllable — here's the argument for keeping it that way, everywhere. Read the case.
You just fought a duel with your voice. Now write with it.
The trick under this game — your voice acting the instant you use it, nothing leaving your machine — is the whole Clabrate Mac app. Hold a key, talk, let go: clean text lands wherever your cursor is. Transcribed on your Mac by default, no cloud required.