Tap left or right to run your sheepdog round that side of the flock. Sheep shy away from the dog, so a dog on the left drives them right. Steer the whole flock through every gap in the fence, and drop back behind to gather stragglers before a narrow gate.
👆 Tap left / right half · ← → keys ← All gamesShepherd hands you the oldest job on the hill: one dog, a flock of ten sheep and a field fence with a single gap in it, then another, and another, all the way down the valley. You never touch the sheep. They move because they would rather not be near your dog, so every decision is about where the dog stands. Put it on the left of the flock and the sheep drift right. Put it on the right and they drift left. Bring it back behind them and they stop sliding sideways and bunch up again. The trick is that sheep carry their momentum, so a good handler drops the dog back before the flock reaches the gap, not after.
Tap the left half of the screen to move the dog one place to the left, and the right half to move it one place to the right. The arrow keys work on desktop. There are three places: left flank, behind, and right flank, shown along the bottom of the screen. Each fence line has two openings: a wide plain gap marked by white lamps, and a narrow gold gap marked x2 that pays double for every sheep through it. Every sheep that walks through an opening is penned and scores, multiplied by your combo. Any sheep that hits the rails is spilled and lost, up to three a fence. While the dog works a flank, the flock gets looser, which the LOOSE meter shows. A loose flock is wide and spills at the gold gap, so the real choice at every fence is greed or safety. Put the whole flock through gold and it is a GOLD GATE, worth a double combo step. In the first act, four clean gates in a row bring a stray back. Lose the last sheep and the day is over.
Past one hundred and thirty points, or sooner on Chill, the low ground turns wet. Bog pools open up between the gates, usually right on the straight line from one gap to the next, and any sheep that wanders into one is gone. You have to swing the flock round the pool and back onto the line in time for the next gate, without letting it fray. Strays no longer come back, and the wind gusts harder. If you like steering a crowd rather than a single runner, try Recruit. For more tap-left, tap-right planning, play Shunt, and for another open field to work across, try Fireline.