Changing anything starts a new game. The standard rules are the defaults; everything else here is a variant for testing.
Positions from real games with one clearly best turn. Make the whole turn on the board — Keeper step, tick and placement as needed — and the board tells you whether it was the best.
The game so far, written out turn by turn. Copy it to keep or share; paste a record and load it to replay a game (step through it with the arrows) or play on from where it stops.
Keepers is the full form of Dial Keepers: the base game, Dials, with a Keeper marble each. The official Zyetopian name is to come.
Five dials of twelve sockets around a hub, read like a clock with 12 at the top. A dial can be turned one click, carrying its marbles with it.
Each player holds the dozen pentominoes and one pin. Every piece is played once. Light moves first and plays from the bottom hand; Dark plays from the top.
Each side has one Keeper, a colored marble (green for Light, red for Dark) that starts on the hub. Before your placement you may step it to an adjacent empty socket: along its dial, straight inward or outward, or between the hub and any dial‑1 socket. On a dial it fills its socket and counts for your color. If its step fills a dial's last socket, the dial is full but waits: it strikes when you place or pass, together with any dial your piece fills, with you as the striker. Nothing strikes in the middle of a turn. The Keeper may also swap: trade places with one of your own marbles directly inward or outward of it (never from the hub); the marble takes the Keeper's old socket, so nothing is left unsettled. That is how a Keeper climbs out through its own marbles, and why a Keeper boxed in by the other side's marbles is trapped until a strike frees it. Settings can allow swaps with any marble, turn the swap off, or make it cost a tick. Settings can instead let a dial the Keeper fills strike at once, before you place.
When the dial it stands on strikes: if you struck it, the Keeper rides home with a bonus of three points per dial: 3 on dial 1, 6, 9, 12 on dial 4, 15 on the rim. The ride is settled: a Keeper that moved this turn cannot ride. Step in and strike at once and it simply comes home with the ordinary harvest. Commit it, survive your opponent's turn, then cash the ride. (Settings offer the older rides instead: double harvest on any dial, harvest × dial, dial squared, and the unsettled ride.) If your opponent struck it, the Keeper is captured: twelve points to the striker (six, or the game, in Settings) and the Keeper goes home. With grace on, a Keeper that stepped on the previous turn is only shaken home, not captured: a claim gets one turn's protection, and lingering is what costs. A Keeper on a dial your opponent can finish next turn, counting their tick, is in check.
When a dial's twelve sockets are all filled it strikes: every marble on it comes off, each player keeps the marbles of their own color, and whoever filled the last socket adds the chime: one point for one dial, and the square for several at once (two dials together chime 4, three chime 9).
Both hands empty, or two passes in a row. Most points wins.
The number beside each name is marbles brought home plus chimes. At the end, every piece still in a player's hand gives the opponent five points (Settings can change it), on top of the marbles that piece never brought home.
The flat chime (one per dial, no bonus for several at once) is the older rule. "Striker places again" gives a bonus placement after any strike. A returning pin comes back to your hand when its dial strikes. Tick refill gives the striker a tick back. These are for testing; the recommended set is tick-then-place with everything else off.
Settings choose your side (Light moves first; random picks each game) and the bot's level: Beginner plays any of its ten best placements, Novice its best few with no lookahead, Club reads your best reply before it moves, Expert searches two turns ahead with a positional evaluation. Each level carries a provisional rating from games between the levels, and your own rating (starting at 1200) moves after every game against the bot in which you did not use undo. Ratings are local to this device for now.
The two round buttons at the foot of the board step back and forward through the game one turn at a time without changing it; the record dims what lies after the position shown. Hold the left button to jump to the start, the right one to return to the live game; the arrow keys do the same (Home and End jump). You cannot move while reviewing. Undo is different: it takes a move back for real, and a game with an undo in it is unrated.
Puzzles… puts a position from a real game on the board with one clearly best turn: make the whole turn (Keeper step, tick and placement as the position needs) and the board says whether it was the best; undo to try again, or see the answer. Themes: strike in one, two dials at once, the ride, capture, trap, turn-then-strike, the Keeper fills the gap, strand a piece. Hint: best move asks the Expert engine for its turn and previews the placement (the game is then unrated). After a game, Analyse this game scores each of your turns against the engine's best and marks the record (?! a slip, ? a mistake, ?? a blunder) with the better turn in notation; step back to the marked turns with the review buttons.
Game record… in the menu writes the game out turn by turn (7. L K>1:3 T2- Y.5@2:4 !2r: Light steps its Keeper to dial 1 at 3 o'clock, turns dial 2 back a click, places the Y on dial 2 at 4 o'clock, and dial 2 strikes with a ride). Copy it to keep or share. Paste a record and load it to step through someone else's game, or to play on from where it stops; a loaded game is unrated.
7. L K>1:3 T2- Y.5@2:4 !2r