One button, up to twelve players
12 orbits is a local multiplayer game for 2 to 12 people playing at the same time on the same screen. Every player needs exactly one button, so a single keyboard, a touchscreen or a controller is enough to get a full group going. Extra controllers are supported if you want more elbow room, but they are not required. The game runs on PC, laptop or tablet, and setup takes seconds even with twelve people in.
Four modes with different rhythms
Arena is a bullet-hell style mode where you paint the arena with spheres of your own color and steer clear of everyone else's, getting more intense as it goes. Multiball plays like football with exploding goals, several balls at once and balls that keep changing color; it is a team mode. Trails has you collecting spheres to grow longer than your opponents, blocking their paths and flinging your spheres at anyone who keeps their distance. Blizzard is the other team mode: a shower of spheres comes down at you and you send them back where they came from. All four modes scale to whatever number of players shows up, so you can start with two and add people as they arrive.
What to know before you start
Rounds last about five minutes, which makes it easy to rotate a big group through the game over an evening. The basic controls are simple enough to explain to a room in one sentence, but the modes leave plenty of room for getting good. Because it only ever asks for one button press at a time, it never needs mashing or holding, so keyboards that only register a few simultaneous inputs still work fine with twelve players. The game is One Switch accessible, menus included, and there is a colorblind mode built on black and white symbols rather than color alone. Controller support covers the whole game apart from one Enter press to skip the launcher. Remote Play Together is available, so someone can join over a remote connection.