Swordfight

How to Swordfight

• The board is 6 wide and 13 high. Pieces fall in pairs from the top of the fourth column.
• The little cut-out swords are breakers. A breaker touching pieces of its colour shatters every connected piece of that colour (side-by-side or stacked, never diagonal).
• Same-coloured blocks in a 2×2 or larger rectangle fuse into one big block. Breaking a fused block sends a strike: a sword that lands on your foe and sits there, immovable, for a turn. Square or tall blocks send vertical swords; wide ones send horizontal swords that slide in from the side. An unchained 2×2 becomes a 1×4 sword and a 3×3 a 2×4.
• Loose blocks (breakers included) send sprinkles: one block for every two shattered, counted per group.
• Attack blocks arrive opaque gray, turn translucent the next turn, then become normal blocks. What colour they become is set by the attacker's sword drop pattern, which is the only thing a sword changes.
• Chains: if falling pieces set off another break, the nth link multiplies by n: Double ×2, Triple ×3, Bingo ×4, Donkey ×5, Vegas ×6. For strikes the chain stretches the fused block's longest side.
• Fill your fourth column and you're sunk. A sword that lands in the top of the fourth column is an instakill. Sprinkles never land there.
• Pick a team flag to fight as crews (2v2, 3v1, 2v1v1…). You can't attack your own crew. Last pirate (or crew) afloat wins.
• Your pirate shows how you're doing: swaggering when your well is clear, bandaged and wobbling as it fills.

Touch screens: use the ↺ ◀ ▼ ▶ ↻ buttons along the bottom, or gestures on the board: drag sideways to slide, drag down to drop fast, flick down to slam, tap left or right of centre to rotate that way. Tap another pirate's board to attack them. On phones you see your own well large, with everyone else in a column on the right grouped by crew.

Controllers drive the menus too: D-pad moves, Ⓐ selects, Ⓑ goes back, ←→ changes a setting, START pauses. On the Battle screen each controller presses Ⓐ or START to take a seat, then sets its own team and sword.

Boss Battles: ten rounds against pirates of history and legend, from Calico Jack to Davy Jones himself. Beat a boss to unlock the next round. Each boss has a signature attack, plays faster, and shrugs off more damage than the last. Bring a partner (on this device or online with the code) and fight as one crew. The boss gets tougher to match: its attacks hit you both.

Playing with friends: every battle has a join code. Anyone can mix players on this device (keyboard, controllers, touch), bots, and friends on their own phones or computers who choose Join a Battle and enter the code, or open your invite link. The captain (whoever started the battle) has to keep their page open.

Esc pauses (local) · M sound effects · N music