Emberwick Relaxing arcade

Flick an ember down a dark canal and light the night.

The wind is shown before every throw, so a miss is always yours to fix. Miss three and the night ends. One thumb, portrait, no sound needed — an attempt takes two to four seconds, which is about the length of a red light.

Get it on the App Store iPhone · iOS 16+

Free. One optional unlock, paid once, opens every other place.

Three rules, and that is the whole game.

Flick to throw

Drag back and let go. Direction sets where it lands, length sets how far. There is nothing else to learn.

Read the wind

It is on screen before you commit, and it is locked the moment you release. The game never changes it mid-flight.

Three misses

Then the night ends and you see two numbers: your best, and this run. One tap starts another.

A new board every day.

One daily challenge, the same lanterns and the same winds for everyone, one attempt. It visits a different place each day, and it is free to play wherever it lands — including the places you have not unlocked.

Scores go to a Game Center leaderboard that resets with the board, so the table only ever holds runs on the same night you played.

Four places to light.

The night canal, with lanterns on the water and a torii gate. — **Night Canal**Paper lanterns, koi under the surface, and a gate at the end of the water. Free, and complete.

A trail of lit lanterns down the canal at night. — **Orbit**A launch corridor under a gas giant. Beat your best and the vehicle on the pad goes up.

A night river in closed jungle, with a lit raft and a village glowing at the far bank. — **Amazonia**A night river in closed forest. You are lighting rafts adrift among the crocodiles.

A New York back alley at night under the Manhattan skyline. — **Midtown**A back alley under the Manhattan skyline, with an elevated train crossing the gap at the end.

What it does not do.

No ads. Not between runs, not anywhere.
No grind. No currency, no upgrades, no energy to wait on.
Nothing you buy improves the throw. The unlock buys places to play, and the physics is identical in all of them.
No account, and no servers. It has never sent anything anywhere.
Works with no signal. Which is the point — it was built for the train.

Help

I bought the unlock and my maps are locked: Open the gear on the title screen and choose Restore purchases. Purchases are tied to your Apple Account, so this also brings them to a new phone.
My best scores are gone: Scores are kept on the device and nowhere else. Deleting the app or moving to a new phone clears them. That is the trade for having no account.
The game has no sound: Correct. There is none to turn on. It was designed to be played with the ringer off, in public, with one hand.
Haptics, or turning them off: The gear on the title screen. They are on by default and off is remembered.
Can I replay the daily?: No. One attempt is what makes the scores comparable — everyone gets the same board and the same single throw at it. Leaving part-way through banks whatever you had.
Anything else: tomvdp@valuestackapp.com — a real person reads it.

Privacy, briefly

Emberwick collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising identifier and no server to send anything to. Your best scores, the place and difficulty you last chose and your haptics setting are stored on the device by the app itself.

Purchases are handled entirely by Apple. The developer never sees a payment detail. Full policy: privacy policy.