Dottle
The old game of flanking and flipping. Put a disc down so that it traps a straight line of your opponent's between that disc and another of yours, and the whole trapped line turns over to your colour. That is the entire rule.
What comes out of it is a game that will not sit still. A board that looks settled can turn over twice in three moves, and a comfortable lead means almost nothing until the last square is filled. Easy to learn in a minute, and genuinely hard to play well — which is why it has outlasted most of what has been invented since.
- A real opponent. Several difficulty levels, up to a minimax search that weighs corners, mobility and edges rather than simply grabbing discs.
- Or a person. Pass the phone across the table for a hot-seat match.
- Nothing hidden. Legal squares are highlighted, so a newcomer never has to guess where a move is even allowed.
- Readable at a glance. Discs flip in a cascade, and a live score and disc count sit where you can see them.
- Room to learn. An undo for takebacks, an optional hint that points at a strong square, and an end screen that tallies the board.
The score on screen is theatre until the last square
People new to this game watch the disc count and panic. People who have played a while ignore it completely. There is an exact reason for that, and it comes from the shape of the board rather than from psychology.
A move turns discs along the eight straight lines running out from the square you played. Each of those eight rays can only deliver what the board's edge allows: to turn k discs in a direction you need k opponent discs and then one of your own, so a ray with a squares in it can never deliver more than a − 1. Add the eight together, square by square, and you get a hard ceiling on how violent one move can possibly be.
The ceiling, square by square
How many discs a move on each square could turn if every ray ran as far as it possibly could. This is arithmetic about rays, not advice: the squares with the biggest numbers are famously not the squares to play, which is the first thing this game teaches anybody.
Not here: no board, no discs, no game, no opening book, no evaluation and nothing played. No corner rule, no parity trick, no hint about a strong square. This counts what the edges of the board allow. What to do inside them is the game.
This page is not a shop
The company is called Epic Bargains and Deals Ltd, and the name does what names do — it describes the business it was registered for, not this page. Nothing on this site is for sale. There is no catalogue, no basket, no checkout, no price, no stock and no delivery. We take no payments here and ask for no card details anywhere, on any page, ever.
If you arrived expecting offers and found a board game instead, that is the whole explanation: a company that publishes an app needs a page the store can link to, and this is it. If a site elsewhere is taking money while using this company's name, it is not us, and we would rather you heard that here than worked it out afterwards.
One mailbox
Bugs, a board that scored oddly, a question about what the app keeps on your phone — all of it to flip@aastaautolaen.online. What Dottle stores and what never leaves the handset is set out on the Privacy Policy page.