A go-slow is a traffic jam. This one is three lanes of stopped Lagos traffic, and you are a dispatch runner going through it. You go round the buses, jump the gutters and duck under the loads. You play alone, and the run ends the first time you get one wrong.
Three lanes. You start in the middle one and you run on your own; you never stop or slow down. Traffic comes at you in rows, and each row blocks one, two or all three lanes.
A danfo, the yellow bus, cannot be jumped or ducked. You go round it. A gutter you jump. A hanging load you duck under. Gutters and loads sometimes cross the whole road, and then there is no lane to hide in.
On a touch screen, swipe on the road: left and right to change lane, up to jump, down to duck. A tap anywhere on the road is a jump. There are also four buttons in the bottom corners that do the same things. On a keyboard, use the arrow keys or W, A, S and D, and Space also jumps. Space, Enter, Up or W starts a run and starts the next one.
After you change lane you cannot change again for a short beat, so two lanes across takes two moves with a gap between them. Read ahead. A jump and a duck each last about half a second, and starting one cancels the other.
A row can have a cowrie in one of the lanes it leaves open. Be in that lane as you pass and it is yours: 25 points, and one more cowrie in your hand. Every row you get past is 10 points, cowrie or not.
Every so often the whole road is blocked and somebody wants settling. You pay in cowries or the run ends there. The first checkpoint is the twenty-first row and asks for 4. After that there is one every 22 rows, and each asks for 3 more than the last, up to 18. The screen shows what you are holding against what the next one wants, and turns red when you are short. Paying takes cowries out of your hand but never takes points off your score.
Now and then there is a charm on the road, a leather pouch bound in red thread. It is never in the same lane as a cowrie, so you take one or the other. Take the charm and for five seconds no bus, gutter or load can end your run. A second charm fills the five seconds back up and does not add to them. It does not work at a checkpoint and it pays no points.
You run into a danfo, miss a gutter, miss a load, or reach a checkpoint without enough cowries. The road also gets harder as you go: faster, with the rows closer together, and with the open lane more and more often on the far side from you. Nobody runs forever. A run that somehow lasts about six minutes is stopped there.
You press Start. The first rows are far apart. A danfo is in the middle lane, so you move left. The next row is a gutter across your lane, so you jump it. There is a cowrie in the right lane two rows on. You go and get it.
By the twentieth row you have passed all twenty and picked up six cowries. That is 200 points for the rows and 150 for the cowries. The screen says the checkpoint wants 4 and you have 6.
You run into the checkpoint. Four cowries are taken, two are left in your hand, and you get the usual 10 for the row. Your score is 360. Nothing was taken off it.
The next checkpoint is 22 rows away and wants 7. You have 2. So you need five more cowries before you get there, on a road that is now faster than the one you started on. That is the game.
Go-Slow is one of our own games, not a traditional one. The words in it are real. A go-slow is a traffic jam. A danfo is the yellow minibus you see all over Lagos. Cowries are the small shells that were once used as money in West Africa. Odeshi is a charm that is said to stop harm from reaching the person who carries it.
The checkpoint is the part everybody who has sat in that traffic will know. You cannot outrun it. You settle it, or you stay where you are.
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one of the games in the Arcade.