Keepers · standard rules v1.0

Keepers is the full form of Keeper's Dial, a puzzle strategy game designed to exercise the mind: the base game, Dials, with a Keeper marble each. The official name is the Zyetopian one, still to come.

Board

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.

Armies

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.

A turn

• Place one piece on empty sockets, in any rotation or mirror. Pieces may run past 12 onto 1. With gravity on, the piece must be settled: pushed toward the hub, it cannot move another dial inward. The pin ignores gravity.
• Tick: turn one dial one click either way. Three per player per game. A tick never fills a dial. In the recommended ruleset a tick comes before your placement in the same turn: turn a dial, then place. (Settings can make a tick the whole turn instead, or allow several ticks before one placement.)
• If a piece fits, you must place. Pass only when nothing fits.

The Keeper

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.

The strike

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).

End

Both hands empty, or two passes in a row. Most points wins.

Score

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.

Matches and the spin

A match is the best of 3 or of 5 games against one opponent — Play a Match on the home page makes a code to send. Colours alternate from game to game; a win is a point and a draw half; the first past half the games wins, and a tie after the scheduled games is played off one game at a time. The next game opens by itself when one ends, and the line above the board keeps the score.

Each player has spins of the board for the whole match: one in a best of 3, two in a best of 5, and an unused spin carries to the next game. A spin comes at the start of your turn in place of that turn's tick, before the Keeper moves — Spin the board in the Options menu or the panel: every dial turns by its own random amount, the marbles keeping their order, pins and Keepers riding along. It is the match's wild card, a way out when nothing fits or a gamble when the position is bad; in a single game there is no spin unless Settings give both players one.

Variants in Settings

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.

Playing the bot

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.

Review

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.

Learning

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

Game record… in the menu writes the game out turn by turn. 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.

Reading a line. 7. L K>1:3 T2- Y.5@2:4 !2r {L 21 · D 9} — turn 7, Light: Keeper steps to dial 1 at 3 o'clock, dial 2 turns back one click, the Y goes on dial 2 at 4 o'clock, dial 2 strikes with a ride, and the score is Light 21, Dark 9. The order in a line is always the order of play: Keeper, then tick, then the placement.

• L Light, D Dark. Dials are numbered 1–5 from the hub outward; a socket is dial:hour, 12 at the top.
• K>2:9 the Keeper steps to dial 2, 9 o'clock; K~2:9 it swaps with your marble there; K>hub it goes home.
• T3+ dial 3 turns one click clockwise; T3- counter-clockwise. S3.7.0.11.5 the board was spun (match play): dials 1–5 turned by those clicks.
• Y.5@2:4 the Y piece, orientation 5, its first cell on dial 2 at 4 o'clock and the rest reaching outward. The pieces: pin, I, L, Y, N, P, T, U, V, Z, W, F, X; the pin is just pin@4:5. The same placement may be written cell by cell: L{1:12,2:12,3:12,4:12,4:1}.
• pass nothing fit (two passes in a row end the game); again a bonus placement in that variant.
• !2 dial 2 struck; !2!4 two dials at once. Suffixes: r the striker's Keeper rode it home, e the Keeper came home without a ride (it arrived this turn), x the other Keeper was captured, s the other Keeper was shaken home under grace.
• {…} a comment: the score after a strike, a chime, a stranded tally (D strands 2, L +10), the result. A ; starts a remark to the end of the line. After an analysis, ?! ? ?? mark a slip, a mistake and a blunder beside the turn.
• The headers at the top name the game type, the ruleset, the players, the date and the result (L 66–52, D 20–31, draw, or * for a game still on); Settings lists only what differs from the standard rules.

Controls

• Tap a piece in your hand, then tap a socket: the piece's innermost cell lands there and the rest of it reaches outward. Drag the preview to adjust. Tap the preview again, or the hub, to place.
• Hands are laid out from simplest to most awkward, left to right: pin, I, L, Y, N, P, T, U, V, Z, W, F, X. A played piece stays in its place as an outline.
• The numerals turn the piece: 9 rotates left, 3 rotates right, 12 mirrors inward/outward, 6 mirrors left/right.
• Press and hold any socket, then swipe along the dial to turn it. That spends a tick.
• Tap your Keeper (on the hub, or on the board) to lift it; the sockets it can reach light up. Tap one to step. K does the same.
• Keyboard: R / Shift R rotate, F / Shift F mirror, Enter place, 1–5 then ← → tick a dial, U undo, H hint, P pass, Esc deselect.