We built a fishing game. It is live now at fish.warriorboatsinc.com, it runs in your phone's browser with nothing to install, and it is free.
The Warrior Shootout puts you on the bow of a V2090 on Lake of the Woods with three minutes on the clock. Your best four walleye count. Longest total wins. There is a top five board and it resets every day, so a bad first run costs you nothing.
It fishes like the real thing
The reason this took a while to build is that we did not want a tapping game with a fish on it.
The sonar in the corner looks forward from the bow, the way forward-facing sonar actually does, and it shows you what is out ahead of the boat. The buttons along the bottom tell you how many fish each spot is marking. Running to a new spot costs you clock, so picking well matters as much as fishing well.
Once you are there, the jig has weight. Drag the rod up and down in big smooth strokes and the lure follows your hand a beat late. That lag is the whole game. Little nervous wiggles do nothing at all, and there is a rhythm meter that tells you when you have found the stroke.
Then the part every walleye fisherman already knows: fish above them. Walleye look up. Keep the jig over their heads and they will come up to it. Drop it below them and you are fishing an empty lake.
Watch the three meters. INTEREST builds slowly and pulls a fish in. COMMIT is fast and means it is about to eat. SPOOK undoes both, and you will earn it by slamming the lure into a fish or setting the hook on nothing.
When one commits you get a short window. Tap. A fish that ate it properly is hooked solid, and a half-hearted swipe comes off in the fight, so good jigging does not only get you more bites, it gets you fish that stay on.
The fight is drag up to reel, left and right to steer the rod. Steer with a running fish to cushion it, against it and the line loads up. Too slack and it throws the hook, too tight and you snap off. Keep the needle in the green and the net swings on its own once the fish is close and tired.
Anything over 25.5 inches is a greenback. A 30 incher is a giant. Good luck.
Where it came from
The Warrior Shootout started as a booth build for the Warrior Rally, so people waiting to talk to us had something to do that was not scrolling. It turned into something we wanted everybody to have.
The boat you are fishing from is the V2090, our tiller platform and the boat that has become a genuinely dominant forward-facing sonar rig. The tournament it is named after is the David A. Andersen Memorial Walleye Shootout, fished on Lake of the Woods every August in memory of Dave.
Come find the real thing at the Rally, August 13 to 16 at Wigwam Resort in Baudette. Until then, three minutes is three minutes.