The rulebook, one board, version 1.15. Every rule here is what the game does right now. Nothing is final.
The game in four lines. You are trying to claim more of the sky than the bot. Line up stars: anything over 3 in a row gets you a drone. A drone is like a checkers or chess piece you move around to claim space and fight. Only scouts claim stars for you; 69 squares wins, or a siege drone standing next to the bot's Command drone.
One 11 × 11 board. Every square holds a star of one of five colors, or an asteroid. Under the stars is a red-and-white checkerboard. The middle row is the seam, the line between your half and the bot's. Stars fall toward whoever is moving. On your turn every column drops toward your back row and new stars come in from the top edge; on the bot's turn everything rises toward its back row and new stars come in from the bottom. Asteroids split a column, so nothing falls through one; clear it with a missile and the column opens.
There are no walls. You start owning a block of nine squares, three by three, at the middle of your back row, with your Command drone, a scout, a siege drone and a shield inside it. Each side starts with asteroids in its own half; the number comes from the ratings.
Asteroids can't be swapped, matched, or entered, and they split a column so nothing falls through them. A missile clears one. They drift: clear 8 or more stars on your side in one turn, cascades counted, and every asteroid on the board moves one square toward you, the way the stars are falling. An asteroid that runs into a lone drone destroys it and takes its square. Into a stack, it knocks one power off and jumps over to the next square; a drone on that square is destroyed. Two squares is the most an asteroid ever moves in a turn. A wall, the Commander, the edge of the board or another asteroid stops it.
Off by default: the whole board shows. Settings has Fog of war with two ways to play in the dark. From the seam: you see your own half, and beyond it only one square around each of your drones (shields see nothing) and squares a scout has claimed, which stay lit all game. Everything dark: even your own half starts dark. In the dark you can't swap, move through, or shoot at a square you can't see, shields may only stand on squares you own or have cleared, and the bot lives under the same fog.
You begin with a block of nine squares at the middle of your back row: your Command drone in the back middle, a scout on its left, a siege drone on its right, a shield at the front edge, already stacked to power 2, and one missile, which your scout loads at once. You move first.
Against the bot the game is relaxed unless you turn Timers on in Settings: no move timer, no clock. With Timers on it is a 20-minute chess clock and 60 seconds a move.
A turn: missiles first, if you want. Then one action: swap two stars side by side to make a line, move one drone, claim with a scout, warp, fire a siege drone, or ram. A swap that makes no line snaps back for free.
Your land is yours. Neither star of a swap may sit on a square the other side owns; you swap on open land or your own. Every square a scout claims is one the other side can no longer play on. A line that forms entirely on their land by itself, after a cascade, clears but pays nothing.
Lines count across, down, and on the diagonal, where they need 4 or more. A 3 clears stars and pays nothing. A shape pays only if part of it is on your side of the seam, and the drone appears on that part, in the color of the star that made it. After a match the stars flow, and any lines that form on their own are yours too.
You can hold 9 drones; turrets do not count. At 9, a shape pays what the right column says, or stacks into your own drone if it was made under one.
| Shape | You get | At 9 drones |
|---|---|---|
| 4 in a line | Scout | nothing |
| 2 × 2 block | Shield | nothing |
| 5 in a line | Raider, white | 1 missile |
| L of 4: a 3-line with one star hooked at a right angle at either end, any way round | Raider, red | 1 missile |
| 6 in a line | Hunter | 1 asteroid onto the other side's land |
| L of two 3-lines | Bomb | Bomb, always |
| T of two 3-lines | Raider, red | 1 missile |
| Plus of two 3-lines, or an X of 5 diagonals | Hunter | nothing |
| V of two diagonals: two diagonal arms of 2 meeting at a corner, the bomb's L turned 45°, any way round | Hunter | nothing |
| L of 4 and 3 | Siege | nothing |
| 7 in a line, 4 crossing 4, or 5 crossing 3 | Warp | nothing |
| 5 crossing 4 or bigger, or a 2 × 3 block | Warp and siege | nothing |
| 3 × 3 block | Warp, siege and hunter | nothing |
Every drone wears its letter: M command, S scout, G shield, R raider, H hunter, W warp, X siege, B bomb. Yours are red letters on a gold rim, the bot's white on blue. The box at a drone's bottom-left is the star color it rides for free; a stack shows one box per color, a hunter's box is every color, a raider's is the red or white of its squares, and shields and sieges have none.
Who takes whom. Raiders take any drone they land on, except a siege. Hunters fight with missiles only. Shields take scouts, hunters, warps and shields by moving next to them on your land. Sieges take nothing and cannot be taken; four enemy drones around one destroy it. Nothing takes the Command drone by landing. Every take earns a missile for your Command drone. Tap any drone, yours or the other side's, to see where it can go and what it can take. After every move the game says what happened and why; turn that off in Settings under Explain moves.
Free rides. Every step onto a star of a drone's own color is free, so it can ride a lane of its color as far as it goes and spend its one paid step before or after. Shields and sieges get no rides. Strikes slide instead.
Stacks. Move one of your drones onto another of yours to stack them. The stack keeps the kind you landed on, adds power up to 3, and gains the other drone's star color so it rides more lanes. The game asks before it stacks. Power is armor against missiles: a power 3 stack takes three hits. It's no help in a fight: a raider takes the whole stack in one landing.
Missiles are stock on your Command drone. Every take earns one there, a drone destroyed by a missile included. Only scouts and hunters fire, and they have to load first: a scout or hunter standing beside your Command drone takes missiles from it, one for a scout, two for a hunter, when it ends a move there and again at the start of each of your turns while it stays. A drone carries its missiles with it; the orange bubble on its disc is its count, and the Command drone's bubble is the stock. Then, before your action, a scout fires once a turn and a hunter twice. A missile flies 3 squares from the firing drone, any direction (5 squares when the fog of war is on), at anything you can see. At a drone it takes one power. At an asteroid or star it destroys it, the stars flow, and any lines that form are yours. Nothing is sacrificed to fire.
Salvage (a Settings option, off by default). With it on, a destroyed drone does not pay its missile at once. It leaves a wreck on its square, glowing, and the missile stays in the wreck until a drone, yours or the other side's, ends its move on that square. Taking a drone by landing on it puts you on the wreck, so those still pay at once; a missile kill, a shield's sweep, a bomb or a surrounded siege leave a wreck somebody has to walk to. Wrecks fade after five rounds. An asteroid that crushes a drone leaves nothing. The stars under a wreck keep swapping and falling as usual. In a two-phone match the host's setting counts.
When your Command drone holds 10 missiles, tap it and choose Build a turret, then an empty square you own. The ten missiles become a turret, letter T, with eight barrels. It never moves. At the start of each of your turns it fires once, by itself, at an enemy drone in the 8 squares beside it, a siege first if one is there, otherwise the weakest. Each shot takes one power, and a drone it destroys pays a missile to your stock like any kill. Only three things end a turret: a bomb, an asteroid, or a siege drone moving onto it. Missiles bounce off it, and raiders and shields cannot take it. The turret fires at a siege beside it before anything else, so a lone siege dies on the approach; a stacked siege takes the hit and takes the turret next turn. It does not count toward your 9 drones. The bot builds them too, from skill 40.
Your starting squares count as yours. Claims and warps take more. Hold 69 squares of the 121 (a setting, 60 to 100) and you win, or stand a siege drone next to the enemy Command drone with no shield beside, or let an asteroid land on it. With Timers on, running out of clock loses.
The first time you open the game it offers to walk you through: a dark board, no clock, and the game lights the square to tap and waits. Move the scout, claim and watch the fog lift, make a match and watch the drone appear. It's in Settings any time as Guided first game.
After that, a quieter hand: with the bot at skill 50 or under, if you sit 30 seconds on your turn the two stars of the best swap light up green.
Settings has Play a friend. Type your name, and the list shows everyone waiting to play; tap a name and the game starts for both of you. Nobody there? Tap I'm ready to play, and your name goes on the list until someone taps it. The status bar then says Connected and whose turn it is. The phone that was waiting runs the game, and both phones show the same board, each with its own side at the bottom. Your rating travels with you: the asteroids are set from both ratings the way they are against the bot, and the game moves your rating at full weight. Leaving an unfinished match counts as a loss. If a phone drops off, open the game again and it picks the match back up. (If the list ever says the lobby is switched off, the waiting phone gets a 4-letter code to read out instead.)
Bot skill moves by tens, 0 to 100. Two things change with it. At skill S the bot plays its best move S% of the time and a random legal move otherwise, so skill 10 is mostly noise and skill 100 is never random. And what its best move knows grows a step every ten; each level keeps everything below it.
You start at 1000 and the number moves the chess way after each game. The bot at skill S is rated 800 + 12 × S: skill 10 is 920, the beginner setting and the default; 50 is 1400; 100 is 2000. A game against the bot moves your rating in proportion to its skill, a tenth at skill 10, half at 50, the full amount at 100. Starting a new game while one is under way counts as a loss.
With Handicap: asteroids from ratings on, the asteroid counts are set from the gap: one asteroid per 50 points, half added to the stronger side's half, half taken off the weaker side's, from the base in the Your asteroids box. The rating change is then worked out from the gap that is left after the rocks.