Celebrating Garden Gnomes: Here's How to Play Google Doodle's Addicting Game
Watch out, it's addictive.
Google tends to make surprisingly addictive games. Whether it’s the hidden T-Rex game or the Where’s Waldo? April Fool’s game, people can waste hours on these simple games, as is the case with Sunday’s Google Doodle game.
On Sunday, Google celebrated the history of garden gnomes with its Google Doodle. After a video explaining how the garden gnome came to be, a game will start up where players use a trebuchet, or catapult, to launch clay gnomes to plant flowers. Once launched, the distance the gnome travels will appear at the bottom, and with each bounce more flowers will be planted. It’s simple enough, but there are some tricks to getting the big air.
To start the game, press the spacebar on your keyboard to get the catapult moving, then press a second time to launch the gnome. Hitting the spacebar too quickly will drop the gnome early and result in a negative distance, and pressing it too early will drop the gnome right in front of the catapult. To get the big distance, press the spacebar right after the apex of the curve in order to get the right mix of height and speed.
The game doesn’t end there. Once in the air, you can hit the spacebar to get the gnome to slam down to the ground. When it hits the ground, the gnome will bounce depending on how it lands, but there are also logs and mushrooms to help propel it even farther. Logs will shoot out of the gnome for more distance while mushrooms will let it bounce. Using a combination of the right release from the catapult and a combination of mushrooms or logs will really propel that gnome. There are also multiple gnome figures to choose from that have different shapes and will bounce differently.
Even though Google Doodles stay on the Google homepage for just one day, those completely addicted to this gnome game can visit the Google Doodle page to keep playing the game for a lot longer.
As for other games, this week is the start of E3 2018, and there are already some big announcements from EA and Square Enix.
