About Quad Chase
A free browser game about the oldest game there is, built around the one rule that makes tag work as a spectator sport: put a clock on it.
Where the twenty seconds comes from
Tag has no natural end. Two children in a park can play it until one of them gives up, which is fine in a park and useless as a format. The sport of chase tag solved that by putting a hard clock on a single chase: one evader, one chaser, twenty seconds. Survive and the evader scores. Get caught and the chase is over early. Then they swap.
That constraint does something specific to how the game feels. Twenty seconds is short enough that the chaser cannot wait you out, so it has to commit — and long enough that a bad commitment is punished. Every interesting thing in Quad Chase falls out of that: the near-miss bonus, the dash on a cooldown, chasers that intercept where you are going rather than following where you are.
Quad Chase is not affiliated with any chase tag organisation. It borrows the format the way a football game borrows ninety minutes.
What we were trying to make
The brief was a game you could be playing eight seconds after hearing about it. No install, no account, no tutorial, no menu tree. Open a link, drag your thumb, and the first chaser is already on you.
That is why quick play teaches itself by round number instead of asking you to read anything, why skills arrive one at a time between rounds 3 and 24, and why the first thing on the screen is a button that says PLAY rather than a login. It is also why there is no Are you sure? anywhere near the retry button.
The second brief arrived later and pulled the other way: a game you finish in twenty seconds is also a game you can finish with. So the Arena was built on top — a disc of your own, a budget that forces real choices, four bosses that each want a different disc, and a descent that only ends when you are caught. The two halves share every mechanic and almost no pacing. Quick play is a snack. The Arena is the meal.
How it is built
Quad Chase is TypeScript and Canvas 2D, bundled with Vite. There is no game engine, no framework and no component library, which for a game this size is less heroic than it sounds — the whole thing is one big module plus a handful of focused ones for netcode, replays, audio and the disc model.
The renderer is a deliberate hybrid. The arena floor and the effects are drawn on canvas; the discs, rings, labels and HUD are ordinary DOM elements. That is not an aesthetic choice. iOS quietly drops canvas backing-store resolution under memory pressure, and the discs are the thing you actually look at for twenty seconds — a blurred score readout is survivable, a blurred chaser is not.
A few other decisions that shaped everything after them:
- It is a PWA and quick play works offline. Install it to a home screen and it runs on a plane. That constraint is why progress lives in your browser rather than on a server.
- Multiplayer is peer-to-peer. Phone controllers, party modes and online duels all connect the devices directly over WebRTC. A public broker introduces them and then gets out of the way, so there is no game server to be down.
- There are no accounts. Leaderboards store the name you typed and the score. Your disc gets a backup code instead of a login — which is a genuine trade-off, not a shortcut: no email means no password reset, and if you lose the code the disc is gone.
- The same code runs everywhere. The browser build is the game; a Capacitor wrapper makes an Android build, and a packaged build runs on game portals. Portals and the native app deliberately behave differently about ads and analytics, which is why the site's scripts check where they are running before they do anything.
Money, honestly
The game is free and there is nothing to buy. Perks and skins are earned, never sold — there is no in-app purchase, and there is not going to be a "remove ads" tier.
Ads exist, but only in two places, and both of them are places you chose to be: a short ad on the game-over screen in the app builds, and an optional ad behind the rescue button that puts you back into a run you had lost. The tip banner on the game-over screen is permanent furniture and will never become an ad slot. Nothing interrupts a round.
On this website, ads appear alongside written pages like this one. If that ever stops being true, it will be a bug, and telling us is a favour.
Where it runs
quadchase.com is the home version and always has the newest build. It works on phones, tablets and desktops, in any modern browser, and can be installed to a home screen. Builds of the same game are wrapped for Android and packaged for web game portals; those lag the site by a release or two, because the site is where things ship first.
Get in touch
Bugs, ideas, leaderboard-name removals and takedown requests all go to the same place: team@quadchase.com. There is also a bug-report button on the main menu, which sends the technical context with it and saves everyone a round of questions.
If you want to know what has changed recently, the changelog is kept honestly, including the parts that were reverted.
PLAY QUAD CHASE