One tile per turn
There is exactly one decision per turn: which tile, which square. No rack to rearrange, no words to look up. Pick a tile up, put it down, and your turn is over — which is why the game survives being played across a whole week.
Place a tile. Match colour or shape. Close a LOOP.
A strategy game that fits in the gaps of your day.
LOOPLY is played by two, three or four people on one shared board. On your turn you place one tile — that is the whole turn. Nobody has to be online at the same time: make your move whenever it suits you, and your phone says when it comes back around.
For iPhone. Sign in with Apple, pick a name, and you are playing.
Nobody waits for anybody
Every game is asynchronous. Play your move, put the phone away, get a notification when it is your turn again. Keep as many games running at once as you can stand.
Two, three or four
A duel is a knife fight over one board. With three or four players it becomes a game of who opens what — the board fills faster than anyone can use it, and blocking becomes a move in its own right.
How it works
Three rules, and you know the game
This is all you need to sit down and play. Everything else lives on the rules page, for the day somebody closes a ring you did not see coming.
Match a colour or a shape
Two side-by-side tiles may touch when they share a colour or a shape. One match is enough, and two identical tiles share both. Diagonals never count.
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Same colour, different shape.
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Same shape, different colour.
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Identical tiles: they share both.
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Nothing in common. Illegal.
Every neighbour has to agree
A tile has to get along with every tile it lands next to, not just the one you were aiming at. One bad neighbour makes the whole move illegal — which is what turns a crowded corner of the board into somewhere you have to think.
You cannot get it wrong by accident: pick up a tile and the squares where it is allowed to go light up. The more you connect to in one move, the better the move.
Close a LOOP
A LOOP is a closed ring of connected tiles that surrounds at least one empty square. Closing one is the moment the whole game is built around — and the last tile is the one that counts, no matter who built the rest of the ring.
A LOOP has a hole. That is the whole rule.
Try it
One ring, one tile short
Pick a tile, then tap a highlighted square — those are the legal moves, worked out with the same rules the game uses. One tile in your rack closes the ring. See whether you spot it before you place it.
Left out here: drawing new tiles, the bonus squares and your opponents. Everything else — the legal moves and the LOOP — is the real thing.
Screens
This is what it looks like
Real positions from real games, on the phone in your pocket. Light and dark are both first-class.
The invitation
Bring someone and start a board
LOOPLY is being built and is not in the App Store yet — this page gets a download button the moment there is something to download. Until then, play the board above, read the rules, and pick the people you want to lose to.