# Sinkers: I made a game where founders sink each other's apps > I wanted a way for people who make apps to compete for attention that was more fun than bidding for it. So I built Sinkers, a free browser game where your app rides on a toy warship and the only way up the leaderboard is to sink whoever is above you. Source: https://karakabakov.com/posts/sinkers/ --- [← All posts](https://karakabakov.com/posts/) # Sinkers: I made a game where founders sink each other's apps [Gjorge Karakabakov](https://karakabakov.com/about/) October 13, 2026 - sinkers - games - indie - launch - app-promotion I make apps on my own, and making them is the part I’m reasonably good at. Getting anyone to notice them is the other part. I’d been looking at leaderboards where founders bid for the top spot. You pay more than the person above you and your app sits there until someone pays more than you. It works, and I understand why people like it. But outbidding another founder isn’t much fun for either of you, and all it shows is who was willing to spend the most that day. I wanted the same idea with the money taken out and something to do put in. So I made a game. ## What is Sinkers? [Sinkers](https://sinkers.app/) runs in your browser. You build a toy warship out of parts you collect, press Battle, and she goes off and fights another captain’s ship without you. You don’t steer and you don’t aim. A fight is over in under a minute, and what decides it is how the two ships were built. Sign in with X and you can give your ship an app: a name, a one-line pitch and a link. From then on your ship carries it. The leaderboard is the billboard. Beat a ship ranked above you and you trade places with it, and your app goes up with you. There are no bids. You can’t pay for a place at all. ![Two toy warships trading rockets and laser fire across a sunny lagoon, each with a hull-points bar above it.](https://karakabakov.com/images/sinkers-battle.webp) ## Why a game and not a directory? Because nobody opens a directory for fun, and I include myself in that. A game gives people a reason to come back tomorrow, and a reason to look at who is above them. If someone sinks my ship, I’m going to read the name on theirs. That’s a different kind of attention from scrolling past a logo, and I think it’s worth more, though I can’t prove that yet. The game went live today. ## What did I get wrong first? Most things, in order. The look took three tries. The first version was pixel art and the second looked like a comic book. I didn’t like either. The third looks like painted miniatures floating in a bath, and that’s the one that stayed. Then there was cheating. The early version let the browser report who had won, which is fine for a toy and a bad idea for a leaderboard that is also an advert. Now the server holds every signed-in player’s ship and fights every ranked battle itself. Your browser just plays the fight back. The one that surprised me was difficulty. I had forty pretend players play a pretend first week, and by day two they were winning 18% of their fights. By day seven it was 1%. They were stuck in the starter dinghy, ranked above ships they had no chance against, and the game had stopped giving them anything. I would have quit too. So each league now comes with a bigger hull. A losing run pays out more with every loss. After two losses in a row you can spar a weaker ship with no trophies at stake, and losing to a ship far stronger than yours costs you nothing. I ran the same pretend week again and the win rate stayed between 55 and 61 percent the whole way through. Real players will tell me whether the pretend ones were right. ## Who do you fight when nobody else is there? Me, sort of. There are twelve house ships on the board that the game sails itself, so a new captain always has someone to shoot at. They carry my own apps: HourSlip, SnagFrog, Gabble, Retriever, Capta and Cleat, twice over. They’re labelled as house ships, they keep their score, and a brand-new dinghy can beat the bottom three. Yes, I put my own apps on the billboard first. It’s my game. They’re there to be passed. ## What does it cost? Nothing. There are gem packs from $0.99 that open chests sooner, and every part in the game can also be earned by playing. Gems don’t buy rank. You also get to design your own flag. It changes nothing in a fight and I like it anyway. ## Where is it? [sinkers.app](https://sinkers.app/). There’s a [guide](https://sinkers.app/how-to-play) if you’d rather read first, and the [leaderboard](https://sinkers.app/leaderboard) is a plain web page you can look at without playing. If you’ve made something, put it on a ship. HourSlip is sitting at the top with 1,200 trophies, and I’d like somebody to take that off me. ## Keep reading [![A frosted glass sheet with five rows of grey bars like a price list, the middle row picked out in lime green, on a pale green field.](https://karakabakov.com/images/avtoceni-claude-crawler.webp) October 11, 2026 ### Using Claude to crawl car prices across the Balkans](https://karakabakov.com/posts/avtoceni-claude-crawler/) [![A glowing database drum on a dark glass tile, with blue and violet light spilling out from behind it.](https://karakabakov.com/images/pocketbase.webp) January 14, 2024 ### Using PocketBase.io as your backend for your next project](https://karakabakov.com/posts/using-pocketbase-as-backend/) [← All posts](https://karakabakov.com/posts/) [Get in touch](https://karakabakov.com/contact/)