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🔷 Stable Footing

The floor is made of tiles carrying symbols. Each round the game announces which symbol stays standing — and all the rest of the floor drops away. Reading fast is worth more than running.

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How a round works

Every tile carries one of four symbols, and each symbol has its own shape and its own colour — you can read it without depending on just one of the two. The game announces which symbol is safe this round, you run to a tile carrying it, and every tile that is not that symbol falls.

A round has three beats, always in this order:

The classic mistake

The safe symbol never repeats from the previous round. Standing on the tile that just saved your life is the most common way to die in this game — and the one that feels most unfair the first time.

The arena shrinks, but the floor comes back whole

After each collapse the entire floor reappears, one eighth smaller than before: it starts full and goes down to a quarter of its size, shrinking from the edges. The arena is not consumed by inherited holes — the squeeze comes simply from there being less room.

Anyone left outside the new arena is pulled back in, not killed. Falling is something a player does by walking, not something that happens to them.

The window to move also shortens each round: it starts at a little over three seconds and ends at about one. At the smallest size the safe area has one fewer spot than there are players — without that, four people reading correctly would survive forever. A measured match runs about seven rounds, or 35 seconds.

Pushing is a legitimate move

You can push whoever is directly in front of you. They move one tile forward — and die if that drops them into a hole. If the destination tile is occupied, the push does not happen.

It is what turns the endgame into a fight for space instead of everyone walking through each other. With a small arena and few safe tiles, pushing stops being cruelty and becomes part of the arithmetic.

Stepping into nothing is not blocked

The game will not stop you from walking off the floor: you walk, and you fall. That is what makes the edge of a shrunken arena a real danger instead of an invisible wall. Only the edge of the grid blocks movement.

Controls

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