Every game on this site is built on a real piece of biology. These are short, plain-English pieces on what that biology actually is — no background required.
The games take liberties on purpose: a cell cannot sprint through a blood vessel, and it certainly cannot dodge. But the things it is dodging are real, and so are the strains you grow, the equipment you hide among, and the strategies that let a cell avoid being found. These articles are where the simplification stops and the actual biology gets explained.
They are written to be read by anyone — no biology background is assumed, and nothing here is a quiz. If you have never thought about what a fibroblast is or why a virus can only infect certain cells, this is a reasonable place to start. If you already know, the articles try to be accurate enough to still be worth your time, and they say plainly where a game has bent reality for playability.
New pieces are added regularly. If you spot something that is genuinely wrong rather than deliberately simplified, please tell me — corrections get made.
Why your blood is built to seal itself in seconds without sealing shut everywhere, what fibrin really is, and the moment a life-saving clot becomes a deadly one. The three obstacles in Cell Rush, explained.
Read the article →A dimpled disc that threw away its own nucleus, and squeezes daily through capillaries narrower than itself. Every part of that is a design decision — and two diseases show what happens when the shape goes wrong.
Read the article →Why procedurally generated music goes completely silent in a browser, why a one-line local server breaks loading, and why enabling the progressive web app option kills a headless export — and why, after fixing every one of them, I deleted the engine build and rewrote the game in 50 KB of plain JavaScript.
Read the article →From a bacterium that doubles every twenty minutes to a cell whose genome was written on a computer. A tour of the eight strains you unlock in the game, why they appear in that order, and one genuinely remarkable fact about each.
Read the article →Wearing the local uniform, showing a "don't eat me" badge, changing costume constantly, and simply playing dead. Six strategies real bacteria, viruses and tumour cells use to evade immune surveillance — and why the game's "stay still to stay safe" rule is more accurate than it has any right to be.
Read the article →