Topple

TOPPLE

Something is sitting across the table. It never speaks and never shows itself — two eyes at the edge of the screen, and a bet you have to cover.

You cover it with dominoes.

The chain

Lay bones on the track, then topple it. Every bone that falls scores.

Each bone carries three numbers and you need all three. The top one is the breath it demands before it will fall. The middle one is what it hands back. The bottom one is what it pays. You open every chain with four breath and not a point more — and a bone that asks for more than you are holding does not fall. The chain stops dead on it. You lose its points, and you lose the doubling that a clean sweep would have paid.

So light bones go in first, to bank breath. Heavy ones go last, to spend it. That is the whole game, and it takes about four rounds to find out it isn't.

The guests

The last round of every ante seats a guest. He changes one rule of the game, and he tightens it after every chain you resolve.

The Skipper takes every second slot and comes back for the rest — then every third, then every fourth. The Tollman charges a point of weight for every ten a bone is printed to score, so the exact stones that pay become the exact stones that will not fall. The Cheat lifts bones off the track from the third slot on, and which ones is not your call. All In counts a single chain, all or nothing, and raises fifteen percent every time you come up short.

Beat one and he leaves behind the object that answered his rule. It belongs to every run you play after that. Eight guests, eight lines in the ledger — and a run you lose still closes one of them.

Between rounds

The counter sells trinkets, bones and tools, and it gives you one free cut on every visit: buying swells your bag, the cut keeps it the size you can still draw from. Trinkets sit on a shelf of five and work on every chain until the run ends. Tools are spent once and change a bone in your bag for good.

Then two doors. The near one is the round exactly as written. The back table pays three dollars more — but the bet climbs fifteen percent and the guest sits down already a notch tighter. It counts for one round, and one only.

The run

Pick your deal: three bags of eighteen bones, one heavy, one light, one even. Then twenty-four rounds across eight antes, and the table you chose decides how many swaps you get for the whole run — eight, five, or three. Only a perfect sweep earns one back.

Thirty bones. Twenty-seven trinkets. Ten tools. Eight guests.

What's in the demo

The first three antes - nine rounds. Same bones, same numbers, same curve as the full game: this is where TOPPLE starts, not a cut-down version of it.

English, French and Simplified Chinese.

On the sound

Every sound in this build is a placeholder, and it is worth saying plainly.

Real sound design is being commissioned, and none of what you hear today will survive it. Judge the chain, not the noise.