Longshot

Nine holes, one stroke each. If the shot misses, the hole is lost — so before you play it you are handed a spade and forty units of soil, and the real question on every hole is not "can I make this shot" but "what shape does the ground need to be for this shot to exist".

How it plays

• Every green sits behind a lip. It is tall enough that a ball rolling slowly enough to drop in the cup cannot climb it, and a ball hit hard enough to clear it cannot stop on the green. That is not difficulty tuning, it is arithmetic: the game generates the lip from its own capture speed. The way in is to cut a channel through it.
• Soil is the budget. Cost is displacement times area, and lowering costs exactly what raising costs — you do not gain soil by digging. A big gentle ridge and a small sharp one can cost the same.
• You cannot sculpt within 1.5 m of the cup, and bedrock patches refuse the spade outright — from hole 5 one sits exactly where the lazy channel would go, so the gate has to be cut off-line and the ball has to arrive at an angle.
• Water, sand, rails and windmills are on the line, and water and sand can be filled in with soil, which is often the best thing to do with it.
• A trajectory preview shows three seconds of predicted flight over the terrain as it is right now — it is the same simulation the shot itself runs, so what it draws is what happens. Undo is unlimited. Everything before the stroke is fully explorable; only the stroke is final.
• Par is 9, one per hole, plus three for each hole lost, minus a tenth of every unit of soil you did not spend. The elegant answer scores best.

Every hole was generated and then PROVED: two hundred naive shots at the flag must all fail, and a scripted ordinary terraform must make at least one go in. Rendered at 384x216 with vertex jitter, affine warping and 15-bit dithering under fog at sixty metres, because coarse terrain should look intentional.