Spill

🎮 About This Game

Spill is a turn-based duel over one board of ink, built on a single rule: every tile has an edge, and ink poured past it goes somewhere. A tile's capacity is the number of tiles it touches — two in a corner, three on an edge, four in the middle — and the small ticks on each tile count it out for you. Drop ink into an empty tile or one you already own; the moment a tile reaches its capacity it spills, sending one drop into every neighbour and dyeing each of them your colour. Spills feed spills, and a well-placed drop can send a chain rolling across the whole board, flipping your opponent's territory as it goes. Lose every drop of your ink and you lose the game. The drama has a rhythm to it. The opening is quiet claim-staking; the midgame is a board full of trembling, nearly-full tiles where neither player dares touch the wrong one; and the endgame is an avalanche — one drop too many, and half the board changes colour before the chain stops. Four boards change the terrain: holes are not neighbours, so every tile around a hole fills faster.

🎯 How to Play

On your turn, tap any empty tile or any tile that already holds your ink — that tile gains one drop of your colour. You cannot add to your opponent's tiles. When a tile's drop count reaches its capacity (the tick marks along its top edge), it spills: it empties, one drop flies into each neighbouring tile, and every tile hit is dyed entirely to the spiller's colour, whatever it held before. If that pushes a neighbour to its own capacity, the chain continues, wave after wave, until the board settles. You win by wiping out every drop of your opponent's colour. A tile one drop short of spilling is primed — it trembles and glows, and it is the most important thing on the board: yours are loaded weapons, your opponent's are tiles you must not stand next to. Play solo against the CPU on Easy, Normal or Hard, or hand the same screen back and forth in 2-player mode. The keyboard works too: arrows move the cursor, SPACE places. Four boards cycle on the title screen — Open and Quick are clean grids, Wells and Ring cut holes in the paper, and since a hole is not a neighbour, the tiles around it have less room and spill sooner.

💡 Tips & Strategy

• ▸Corners first is a good opening — a corner holds only two drops, so it primes in one move and only two tiles can ever attack it. But corners are an opening, not a plan: our corner-only test bot lost every single game, usually inside 16 moves, because whoever owns the middle owns the chains.
• ▸Never place next to an enemy primed tile. When it spills, everything it touches becomes theirs — including the drop you just donated. The heuristic our own CPU runs treats a tile adjacent to an enemy primed tile as nearly worthless, and so should you.
• ▸Primed tiles are threats even while they wait. A primed tile of yours forces your opponent to play around it; two primed tiles side by side are a bomb with two fuses — spilling either one sets off the other.
• ▸Count before you pop. A spill dyes its neighbours but also empties your tile — cascading into two enemy drops is a trade, cascading into six is a massacre. The best players in our simulations were the ones that waited one extra turn.
• ▸On Wells and Ring, the tiles hugging a hole behave like extra corners: they fill sooner and make chains ignite faster. The terrain decides where the flashpoints are — read it before your first move.
• ▸The endgame snowballs on purpose: once most tiles are primed, whoever triggers the avalanche usually decides the game. If you are ahead on ink, force it early; if you are behind, stall and build your own fuse network first.
• ▸In 2-player mode the first move is not the edge it looks like — we measured first-mover win rates between 42% and 53% across every board and skill level, which is why Spill has no compensation rule. If you keep losing, it is the chains, not the seat.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions