Anchoreum: A New Game for Learning Anchor Positioning

You’ve played Flexbox Froggy before, right? Or maybe Grid Garden? They’re both absolute musts for learning the basics of modern CSS layout using Flexbox and CSS Grid. I use both games in all of the classes I teach and I never get anything but high-fives from my students because they love them so much.

As widely known as those games are, you may be less familiar with the name of the developer who made them. That would be Thomas Park, and he has a couple of CSS-Tricks articles notched in his belt. He also has a horde of other games in his CodePip collection of free and premium games for learning front-end techniques.

Thomas wrote in to share his latest game with us: Anchoreum.

I’ll bet the two nickels in my pocket that you know this game’s all about CSS Anchor Positioning. I love that Thomas has jumped on this so quickly because the feature is still fresh, and indeed is currently only supported in a couple of browsers at the moment.

This is the perfect time to learn about anchor positioning. It’s still relatively early days, but things are baked enough to be supported in Chrome and Edge so you can access the games. If you haven’t seen Juan’s big ol’ guide on anchor positioning, that’s another dandy way to get up to speed.

The objective is less on-the-nose than Flexbox Froggy and Grid Garden, which both lean heavily into positioning elements to complete game tasks. For example, Flexbox Froggy is about positioning frogs safely on lilypads. Grid Garden wants you to water specific garden areas to feed your carrots. Anchoreum? You’re in a museum and need to anchor labels to museum artifacts. I know, attaching target elements to the same anchor over and again could get boring. But thankfully the game goes beyond simple positioning by getting into multiple anchors, spanning, and position fallbacks.

Whatever the objective, the repetition is good for developing muscle memory and the overall outcome is still the same: learn CSS Anchor Positioning. I’m already planning how and where I’m going to use Anchoreum in my curriculum. It’s not often we get a fun interactive learning resource like this for such a new web feature and I think it’s worth jumping on it sooner rather than later.

Thomas prepped a video trailer for the game so I thought I’d drop that for reference.