The plas opens on a phone now.
Not a smaller version of it. The same lake, the same four plassen, the same nine kilometre an hour limit, the same waterboswachter with the same ten-second lecture. The same rooms, too, so a phone on a train and a laptop on a desk end up on the same water, in the same race, and neither one can tell which the other is.
Hold it sideways.
The helm. Your left thumb steers. Put it anywhere on the left of the glass and a stick appears under it, exactly where you landed: there is nothing to find and nothing to look down at, which matters, because the only thing worth looking at is the water. Your right thumb has the throttle: one lever with four notches in it. Astern, neutral, ahead, and then all the way up, which is where the nine kilometre an hour rule stops applying and your afternoon starts going wrong.
Let go and it comes back to neutral, because a throttle that stays open while you are looking at something else is a boat doing forty into a bank. But it does not shut the instant you take your thumb off. It holds for as long as you are pressing anything else, and for a moment after, long enough to put a duikfles through somebody's afternoon and get back on the gas.
The camera is the right half of the screen. Drag, and the view swings round the boat by however far your thumb went. Two taps and it drops back in behind the transom.
The map sits in its corner, and one tap opens it into the whole plas (every harbour, every zandeiland, everybody who is out there) and another puts it back. There is no M key on a phone, so the map is the button.
And the browser gets out of the way. On Android and on a tablet the game asks for the whole screen the moment you take the keys, and turns itself landscape. On an iPhone it cannot: Safari has never had that switch, and no amount of asking will produce one. So there it does the other thing: Share, then Add to Home Screen, and from then on it opens as an app with no address bar at all. On a phone-sized screen that is a surprising amount of extra lake.
None of the game changed to make this work. Every control on a phone fills in exactly the same handful of numbers the keyboard has always filled in (throttle, helm, and four buttons), so the boats, the police, the wanted stars and the race are the ones that were already there. The only new thing is what your thumbs are doing.
An iPhone XR is a phone from 2018. It runs this without getting warm.