Tens of thousands of games, for a single rule.
Before a rule goes into a product, we attack it: mass simulation, exhaustive computation, games around a table. None of it shows on screen. It's the reason a game still holds up on the thirtieth play.
We remove nothing without proving it first
Removing is easy; proving something has to go is expensive.
None of these came from instinct
Each one came from a number. Several run against what we believed at the start.
- SwashThe no-return rule
Without it, two cautious players slide the same piece between two squares forever. Across twelve thousand simulated games, up to 84% of high-level games ended in repetition. Repetitions are now 0–16%.
- SwashThe 4 × 4 is solved
An exhaustive endgame base: 9,879,533 positions and 57,947,401 transitions. No opening placement forces a win, which proves the game is perfectly fair.
- Swash DeepCross-placement
Letting each player lay out their own pieces decided the game before the first move. Each now places the opponent's Pearl — balance restored without adding a rule.
- MercatoThe weakest link
Two strategies crushed everything: three stars and filler, or buy cheap and sit on the cash. A score reading your weakest player pushed the hoarding strategy down to a 2% win rate.
- OrbitThe hidden trajectory
With a full preview of the curve, the game solved by sweeping angles until the line hit the target. Removing it forces you to build an intuition for gravity — which is the point of the game.
- BankPar runs backwards
We gave expert players more shots. Wrong way round: expert courses aren't harder, the players are better. Par now tightens as you improve.
Always in this order
An unbalanced rule is fixed at stage two. After that it costs ten times more.
Rules
Written out in full, edge cases included: deadlock, repetition, draws, running out of time.
Validation
Balance measured across thousands of games, exact solving where the size allows it.
Visuals
Final and approved before a single interface is built.
Interface
Built once, on those visuals. Never twice.
Integration
Engine, network, release — then nine automated checks, any one of which blocks delivery.
And what we threw away
Free placement of pieces. A diagonal piece on the 4 × 4. A clock increment. A cap on bounces. A tenth arcade game.
Free placement decided the game before the first move. A diagonal piece broke the simplicity of the small board. A three-second increment per move handed the computer an advantage it hadn't earned. Capping bounces removed the whole point of the game.
And the tenth arcade game works fine — it just isn't as good as the other nine, so it stays out of the catalogue. What has been validated is never touched again: it's the only way to move forward without undoing what worked last week.
Easiest thing is to try one
The games run in your browser, free. The apps are in the catalogue.