Harry Potter Galleon

Harry Potter Galleon was one of those simple Flash games you'd find on a fan site in the mid-2000s. It came out around 2005, I think, and it was just there, a quick distraction between homework or browsing. You didn't need a fancy setup, just a browser and a mouse. It felt very much of that era, a straightforward puzzle game using the familiar wizarding currency as its pieces.

You control a small cannon at the bottom of the screen, aiming with your mouse and clicking to fire a golden Galleon upward. Your goal is to clear the board. You do this by matching three or more coins of the same type in a cluster, making them vanish. The main challenge is that the entire mass of coins slowly descends toward you. If it reaches the bottom, the game ends. You have a power-up, activated with the spacebar, that lets you throw a special coin to break up tricky formations. The pace is steady, a constant push against gravity. It feels like a race against a sinking pile of treasure, where a few careful shots can save you, and a missed one brings everything closer.