TapzzleSharp eye. Fast finger. Picture stolen.
A phone lying flat in the middle of the table. A reel that slows down, pretends to stop, then really stops — and at that exact moment the pictures appear. The right one is there only once. The first finger on it wins the round.
Touch nothing while it’s spinning.
One round, right here
Here is a whole round, in miniature. Wait for the reel to stop — touching before that is already a false start — then find the picture it is showing on the board.
It’s spinning… hands off.
Three cards, then you play
The game explains itself in three sentences, and the third one is already a round. This is exactly what the phone shows on first launch.
Put it flat in the middle of the table, where everyone can reach it. It shows the game, but you are the ones who name the winner at the end of each round.
The reel in the middle slows down and often looks like it is about to stop. While it turns, the cells stay empty: there is nothing to look for.
When it stops, the picture it shows appears on the board, in one place only. Find it and put a finger on it before the others. The screen freezes, and you tap the winner’s colour.
What drives the table mad
So it does not stay still. Four rules make the whole evening, and every one of them is a reason to shout.
Three figures swap cells in a ring, the target included — and one of the three may come off the bench, drawn with the round but kept off the board. The target moves like the others but never leaves the board: whoever spotted it and hesitated has to find it again. The move takes 420 ms and it shows: a figure you do not see leaving is a figure that was stolen from you.
A finger before the stop, and the whole screen goes red. The reel freezes while the finger stays down — a 1200 ms ceiling restarts it by force, for anyone who thinks they can block the game. The phone does not know who did it: it asks for their colour, and the table answers.
The cell flashes red, whoever tapped it is out for the round, and the round carries on. Several cells can flash at once: two people can get it wrong in the same second, and one does not erase the other’s mistake. A wrong answer costs its author the round, never the table.
Every picture is square and laid down at a random angle between 0 and 360°, never a multiple of 90°, redrawn every round. Around a table nobody has a good side: the rotation removes the advantage of where you sit.
Twelve boards
The board is redrawn every round, and not at random: a dozen layouts alternate, drawn so that none serves twice in a row nor comes back before all of them have been used. Three cell sizes, from single to triple — a large one is spotted at a glance, a small one has to be hunted. And the free slots stay free: it is the holes that make the sizes read as sizes.
Only the central reel always keeps the same size: it is the reference everybody reads.
The pictures
No picture is loaded from the network: they are drawn in code and baked once before the first round. And no pair may become confusable once rotated — the most important constraint in the game, and the one that decides everything else.
Ten families of strongly asymmetric silhouettes, four colourways each, and on every one an off-centre accent that gives it its landmark.
Thirty-six films, and not one film drawn: two or three clues, never the hero. The place one minute before they arrive, or one minute after they leave.
Creatures you know by their silhouette, blurred and upside down.
The contents of a kitchen drawer, the things you name before you have really looked.
What turns up there, provided none of it has a top or a bottom.
And when there is nobody
Every round is worth a time drawn at random between 5.2 and 8.6 seconds. The clock only starts when the pictures land: the spin length is random too, and counting it would be counting noise.
And it tightens. A round finished in less than half its time shaves 10 % off the range; a round taken to the last tenth gives 14 % back. In between, nothing moves: a mode that reacted to every round would never settle anywhere.
A gauge empties along the top of the board and turns from green to red. In the last three seconds a red glow flashes faster and faster. Blurred, never a solid border: on a phone, an opaque frame would cover the very pictures it is urging you to find.
Floor at 36 %: around two seconds, a board that reads at a glance and nothing more.
What you need
Table ready?
Tapzzle opens in the browser, on the phone already lying on the table. No account, no app store, no waiting.
Start a gameplay.tapzzle.com