one button golf: nine holes, one key, infinite anger.

Nine holes. One key. A four-minute round that will live in your head all afternoon. The most distilled timing game I have made.

Play One Button Golf →

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What is One Button Golf?

One Button Golf is a free browser game where you play nine holes of golf using exactly one input. There is no aim. There is no club selection. There is no wind gauge, no spin meter, no force-direction joystick. There is one button.

You press it to start the swing. A meter fills. You press it again to commit the power. The meter splits into a second axis — your aim. You press it a third time to commit the angle. The ball flies.

You did this in maybe two seconds. You probably mistimed at least one of the three presses. The ball is in a sand trap. Welcome to One Button Golf.

Why one button?

One-button games are a small genre — Canabalt, Flappy Bird, the entire Fischinger-school of timing toys — and the discipline they impose is real. The constraint forces you to do everything with rhythm. There’s nothing you can simulate with extra inputs. There’s only “press, don’t press, when.”

Golf is a great fit for this constraint, because golf is already a timing game. The actual sport is about the moment of contact. Every swing analysis on TV is a frame-by-frame discussion of three-thousandths-of-a-second adjustments at the apex of the backswing. One Button Golf takes that and dumps everything else — the gear, the course management, the simulated wind — into a single, mean meter.

You’re left with the only thing that ever actually mattered: did you press the button at the right moment.

How do you actually swing?

Three presses per swing.

Press one starts a power meter that fills from left to right. It rises, peaks, falls. You want to release at the peak. You will not release at the peak. You will release ten percent early because you got nervous, or fifteen percent late because you got greedy.

Press two locks in the power and pivots the meter to an aim arc. The arc swings from your left edge to your right edge in about two seconds. Holes have rough on both sides; the safe zone is small.

Press three commits the angle and the swing happens. The ball flies. You watch it. You know within half a second whether you made the right call.

Repeat for nine holes. Best score wins. The course par is 36. I don’t think I’ve ever shot below 41.

The difficulty curve

The first three holes are forgiving. The fairways are wide. The greens are flat. The meter swings slowly. You will probably finish them under par and start to feel cocky.

The fifth hole is mean.

It’s a dogleg right around a small lake, and the meter on it swings about 30% faster than the previous holes. If you bring the rhythm you used on holes one through four, you will land in the water. If you over-correct, you will land in the rough on the right. There is one timing window — about 80 milliseconds wide — that puts you on the green in two. If you find it, the rest of the course is downhill. If you don’t, you spend the whole back nine trying to recover the strokes you lost.

I’m pretty sure hole five is what makes One Button Golf stick. It teaches you that the game has a real difficulty model under the cartoon. After hole five, you stop trusting the meter and start counting frames.

How long does a round take?

Best-case: about three and a half minutes. Worst-case: about six. The “I just want to beat my score” loop is what does the damage — you’ll play a round, lose, play another, beat your previous round by one stroke, lose to par, play another. Suddenly it’s an hour later and you have feelings.

Is it free?

Yes. No install. No signup. The whole game is one HTML file plus a JS bundle that’s smaller than this review.

What I learned making this

You can ship a complete game in a couple of weekends if you’re disciplined about cutting features. One Button Golf has no menu — the splash screen is also the start of hole one. It has no difficulty levels — the holes themselves do that work. It has no settings page. There is exactly one accessibility option: keyboard remap, in case space conflicts with your screen reader. That’s it.

The thing I’m proudest of is the par. Setting par on a procedural-feeling timing game is harder than it sounds. Set it too low and the game feels punishing; too high and there’s no satisfaction in beating it. I tuned par by playing every hole 200 times and taking the median score I shot when I was paying full attention. If you’re shooting around 36 — par — you’re playing the way I designed the game to be played.

Where to play

One Button Golf is free in your browser. One round, three minutes, then go back to your day. Or don’t.

— Ori