Goal
You are tilers cutting a floor from one shared yard of stone. Lay the best 5×5 floor.
Everything is on the table: there is no hidden hand.
The stone
Five kinds. Each has its own colour and its own mark, so you never have to go by colour alone:
Your turn
- Take. Tap a stack in the yard and pick one colour. You take every tile of that
colour from that stack, and everything else in it slides into the spill: the
loose stone in the middle, which anyone may take from next.
- Instead of a stack you may take every tile of one colour from the spill. Nothing
slides anywhere when you do.
- Lay. Put the tiles you took on your floor, one at a time, on any glowing cell.
What you leave behind matters as much as what you take. Taking one tile from a full
stack hands the other three to the player after you.
Laying a tile
- A colour may appear only once in a row and only once in a column. The glowing
cells are exactly the legal ones.
- A tile scores 1 for every other tile in its run across, plus 1 for every other
tile in its run down, counted after it lands. A tile with no neighbour at all scores
1. So a tile that lands making a run of four across and a run of three down scores
3 + 2 = 5.
- Any tile you cannot lay (or choose not to) becomes a chip.
Chips
Chips are wasted stone and they cost points on a rising scale: , and so
on. Two chips are a scratch; five are a disaster. Take only what your floor can hold.
The chisel
The first player to take from the spill each course picks up the chisel: it costs
one chip, but they choose first from the next course's yard.
Courses
When the yard and the spill are both empty, the course ends and a fresh yard is laid out.
Whoever holds the chisel goes first.
Scoring and the end
- Run points, as above, are scored the moment a tile lands.
- Each finished row: .
- Each finished column: .
- All five tiles of one colour on your floor: .
- Minus what your chips cost.
Finishing a row ends the game. The current course is played out in full, then the
bonuses are added. Finishing your row early gives everyone else more turns; finishing it late
cuts them off; that timing is yours to judge.
Ties go to the player with fewer chips, then to the one with more finished columns.
On screen
- Take: tap a tile in a stack (or a group in the spill) to choose that colour, then
✓ Take. The tiles you would take lift; the ones you would give away sink.
- Lay: tap a glowing cell. The bar shows how many tiles you still hold.
- Chip it appears when a tile has nowhere to go, and as a small option when you would
rather waste a tile than spoil a line.
- The chips at the top show every score. Tap a rival to see their floor; tap your own for the
full breakdown.
Tips
- Columns are worth far more than rows. Rows end the game; columns win it.
- Leaving a big single-colour spill is a gift. Sometimes take two tiles you half-want just to
keep them away.
- Keep every colour somewhere to go. A colour with no legal cell is a chip waiting to happen.