How to play
You are a potter of the Glazewick studio. There are 100 glaze tiles in five colours: Cobalt, Celadon, Saffron, Oxblood and Ash. Each colour has its own carved sign, so you never need the colour alone. Every round, the kilns are filled with 4 tiles each. Players take tiles in turn until the kilns and the shelf are empty. Then every drying row that is full fires a tile into your panel, and you score.
Your turn
- Choose a source. Pick a kiln, or the shelf in the middle, and one colour on it. You take every tile of that colour there.
- Leftovers. When you take from a kiln, its other tiles slide to the shelf. The first player to take from the shelf in a round also takes the tongs, which count as one broken piece, and starts the next round.
- Fill a drying row. Put all your tiles in one drying row. Row 1 holds 1 tile, row 2 holds 2, and so on up to 5. A row holds one colour only, and it must not take a colour that is already in the same row of your panel. Tiles that do not fit, or that you cannot place, go to the breakage row. You may also put all of them there on purpose.
Firing and scoring
Your panel has 5 rows and 5 columns, and each colour sits once in every row and every column. A full drying row sends its right-most tile to its row of the panel, and the other tiles of that row go to the pail. A tile with no neighbour scores 1 point. A tile next to others scores the length of its unbroken line across, and the length of its unbroken line down, when each is 2 or more.
Then your broken pieces cost points, from the left slot to the right. Your score never goes below 0.
-1 -1 -2 -2 -2 -3 -3
The end
The game ends after the round in which any player completes a row of the panel. Each player then scores 2 points for every complete row, 7 for every complete column, and 10 for each colour that has all 5 of its tiles on the panel. The most points wins. A tie goes to the player with more complete rows.
At the online table
- Tap a kiln, then a colour, then a drying row, and tap Put down. On a wide screen, tap a tile to pick its colour at once. On a keyboard: the keys 1 to 9 pick a kiln, L picks the shelf, 1 to 5 pick a row, 0 picks the breakage row, and Space puts the tiles down.
- Each decision has a 60-second timer. If it runs out, the table plays the safe take for you: the one that breaks the fewest pieces.
- An empty seat is taken by a bot, always marked as a bot.
Why it is fair
A secret seed decides who starts and the order of the clay bin. You see its fingerprint when the game starts and the seed itself when it ends, so you can check it. Verify a game.
Playing online for the first time?
Our guide compares the ways to play online, with steps for each. Read the guide to playing online.