Millstone

Goal

You are a miller with a sack of grain. Grind grain into flour; the most flour at the end of the season wins. Nothing is hidden: every sack on the table is shown in full.

Your turn

1. You draw a handful of three grains from your sack.
2. Tap a grain, then send it to the millstone or to your purse. Grain on the stone becomes flour. Grain in the purse becomes coins.
3. Spend coins: buy one grain from the granary, sift one grain out of your sack for good, and once a game fit a fine sieve. One of each a turn.
4. Tap Done. Everything you drew goes into your bin. When the sack runs empty, the bin is tipped back in and you draw from it again.

Coins keep. Flour keeps. Nothing else carries from turn to turn. Rye is the only grain worth more in the purse than on the stone, and you can never buy more of it, so every coin you spend came out of flour you chose not to grind.

The grain

Bought grain goes into your bin, so it comes round on your next pass through the sack.

The millstone (everyone shares it)

• The stone has grooves. Every grain that makes flour wears one groove away.
• With no grooves left the stone is dull: it then makes just 1 flour from any grain, however good. Chaff never makes flour, so it never wears the stone.
• The stone is dressed a little overnight, so each round opens with grooves again, though never as many as the table will use. Grind early and you grind sharp; the miller after you gets what you leave.
• Whoever starts the round changes each round, so everyone gets the sharp stone in turn.
• Instead of grinding, you may dress the stone yourself: every grain you put on it then restores 3 grooves and makes no flour. Chaff scours perfectly well, so a poor handful is worth something after all.

Sifting, and the fine sieve

• Sifting costs 3 coins and takes one grain out of the game for good.
• The fine sieve costs 6 coins, is bought once, and drops the price of every later sifting to 1 coin. It is the one improvement you can make to your mill.
• A sack never drops below 4 grains, and you always draw 3 a turn.
• What you take out matters as much as what you put in: a small, clean sack draws its good grain nearly every turn, while a fat one buries it.

The end

• The season lasts a set number of rounds (10 with two millers, 9 with three, 8 with four), and ends early if the granary is emptied.
• Most flour wins. A tie goes to the tidier mill (fewer grains), then to the one with less chaff.

On screen

• Your sack strip shows every grain you own. Bright ones are still in the sack; faded ones are in the bin, waiting. That is exactly your odds for the next draw.
• Tap a rival's name to see their sack.
• Each kind of grain has its own shape as well as its own colour, and carries its flour value on its face.