Shuinlar — Keeper's Dial

Rules 1.5 · Launch Standard

The game is Shuinlar (Zyetopian Shuin-lar, "Keeper's Dial": shuin the keeper, the one who harvests; lar the dial — the underline marks the glide, the dash possession). Dials is the base game. Keepers adds one Keeper marble each. Everything below is Keepers; leave out the Keeper section and you have Dials.

Board and armies

Five dials of twelve sockets around a hub, read like a clock with 12 at the top; dial 1 touches the hub, dial 5 is the rim. Each dial turns on its own, one click at a time, carrying its marbles. Each player has the twelve pentominoes and one pin (thirteen pieces, sixty-one marbles), played once each; a piece is laid as marbles of your colour in empty sockets, in any rotation or mirror, and may run past 12 onto 1. Light moves first. Each side also has a Keeper, a coloured marble that starts on the hub: not a piece, never harvested.

A turn

Before you place you may move your Keeper and turn a dial: each at most once, in either order, or not at all.

The order can matter, and it is yours: a tick carries a Keeper standing on that dial and changes the marbles beside it, so moving the Keeper first or turning the dial first can end in different places.

Then:

Pass only when nothing fits. A turn without a placement is a pass, whatever the Keeper or a tick did first. With an empty hand you still take turns.

A locked board. When both sides pass in a row with pieces still in hand, the fullest dial strikes by itself, and every dial tied with it for fullest strikes too: nothing picks between them. Each side scores its own marbles there; nobody scores the chime; a Keeper on a struck dial goes home without a ride or a capture; a pin on it comes off like any marble. Then play goes on with the next turn, as often as it takes (the record notes it {lockdown: dial 3 strikes, L +5 D +6}, or {lockdown: dials 2 and 5 strike, L +11 D +11}).

Strikes and scoring

A struck dial's marbles come off: each side scores its own marbles (the harvest); the striker scores the chime — 1 for one dial, 4 for two at once, 9 for three (the square). Keepers go home, unharvested. The game ends when both hands are empty. Most points wins; equal is a draw.

Only after twenty locked boards in one game would two passes end it instead; no game has come near, and since 1.5 a piece left in a hand costs nothing (it gave the opponent a point under 1.2 to 1.4).

The Keeper

Matches and the spin

A match is the best of 3 or of 5 games between two players, colours alternating from game to game (the maker chooses theirs for game 1). A win is a point and a draw half a point; the first past half the games wins, and a tie after the scheduled games is played off one game at a time. Matches are played without spins of the board since the fifteenth round (before it each player had one in a best of 3, two in a best of 5, carried between games; matches made then keep theirs). Each side's Keepers are those of the look the player plays on (a matter of sight, not of rules).

A spin comes at the start of your turn, in place of that turn's tick, before the Keeper moves: every dial turns by its own random amount (the server rolls it; the record writes it S3.7.0.11.5), the marbles keeping their order on each dial, pins and Keepers riding along. Its worth was measured in lab-results.md. A game has no spin unless Settings give both players one (shuffles).

Versions

Settings

Everything else in the app's Settings is a variant kept for testing: flat chime, ride scalings (three a dial was the rule until 1.4), unsettled rides, any-colour swaps, inward/outward-only swaps (keeperSwapDir: 'radial', the 1.0 rule), spins of the board (shuffles: every dial turns by its own random amount, once a game each, in place of a tick), two passes ending the game (lockdown: 'end', the rule until 1.3), swap costs, strike-at-once, tick modes, bonus placements, returning pin, tick refill, jam ending, the tetromino army, rim gravity. The engine also keeps, for the lab and for replaying 1.3 records, the jam spin (jamSpin), the locked-board strike once a game or an unscored clear (lockdown: 'strike' | 'clear'), only the innermost of tied dials striking (lockdownTie: 'inner'), an even harvest at a locked board (lockdownScore: 'split' | 'least') and two tiebreaks (tiebreak); the app no longer offers them. The standard is STANDARD in the engine; lab-results.md has what the variants did in simulation.