Mechanic Preview
An engine builder where the engine is a keyboard — each letter is a slot you stock with victory points.
Your engine is the keyboard. You have a pool of 27 victory-point tokens — one for each letter and one for the ↑return key. The default pool concentrates on +0 with a fat tail on either side: 1×+5, 2×+4, 3×+3, 4×+2, 4×+1, 6×0, 4×−1, 3×−2. You can reshape the pool by trading: split any token N into two (N−1) tokens, or merge two N tokens into one (N+1) — every gain in one slot must be paid for by a reduction somewhere else.
Each round, you click an upcoming category to claim the green slot; a second category is filled in at random for the clay slot. You pick a word from the green slot (or type your own); the AI picks the word in the clay slot to hurt you — it scans every word in that category for the one that scores you the fewest points given your current token placements. The keys you still need to assign for the round get a pulsing clay ring; once every needed key (and ↑) holds a token, you can transmit. Each typed letter scores whatever token sits on its key, plus the ↑ token at the end of each word — that’s your engine running.
Only tokens currently in the bank can be split or merged. Click a token in the bank to select it, then click a key to assign.
Transmit a round to log it here.