Everything, in the order you need it

1 · Setting up

One square board, shared by everyone. Every tile has exactly one of five colours and one of five shapes, which makes 25 kinds of tile. Colour and shape both carry meaning, and every tile is identifiable by either one alone — that is an accessibility requirement of the game, not a preference.

The bag deliberately holds fewer tiles than the board has squares, so the board never quite fills. Turn order is shuffled by the server; the person who created the game gets no say in it and no advantage from it. The first move must go on the centre square.

2 · Your turn

On your turn you do exactly one of four things.

Miss the deadline and the server takes your turn for you — a skip, worth nothing. Three skips in a row and you are dropped from a group game, because one absent player should not be able to slow a board down indefinitely.

3 · The connection rule

Two tiles that sit side by side — never diagonally — form a valid link when they share a colour or a shape. That is the entire rule, and everything else in LOOPLY is built on it.

• ✓
  Same colour.
• ✓
  Same shape.
• ✓
  Identical tiles may touch: they share both.
• ✗
  Neither colour nor shape. Illegal.

4 · When a move is legal

A placement is legal when all of this holds:

• The tile is in your rack and it is your turn.
• The square is on the board and empty.
• If the board is empty, the square is the centre square.
• Otherwise the square touches at least one tile already on the board.
• Every tile it touches links to it. One bad neighbour out of four makes the whole move illegal — this is the rule people misread most often.

The app never lets you make an illegal move: pick up a tile and the squares it may go on light up. That is not a hint system you can switch off, it is the rule made visible.

5 · What counts as a LOOP

A LOOP is a closed ring of connected tiles that surrounds at least one empty square. A LOOP has a hole; that is the whole test.

The consequences worth knowing:

• The smallest possible ring is eight tiles. Rings of five, six or seven do not exist — the grid does not permit them.
• The board edge is not a wall. A gap that touches the outside is not enclosed, so half a ring against the edge scores nothing.
• The LOOP pays out to whoever places the last tile of the ring, however many of the others somebody else laid. Finishing another player's ring is a tactic, not an accident.
• Squares inside a LOOP stay playable, and playing in there can close further LOOPs.
• One move can close at most three LOOPs at once. That is a property of the grid, not a cap someone chose.

6 · Scoring

One placement scores three things, added together:

A bonus square underneath the tile you just placed multiplies one of those: a × TILE square multiplies the tile's own value, a × LOOP square multiplies the entire move — everything, LOOP bonus included. A bonus square works once and is spent as soon as it is covered. The centre square, where the first move is forced to go, is a 2× LOOP square.

Two more, at the end: playing your last tile while the bag is empty is worth +10, and the first placement of each player carries a small calibrated bonus that cancels out the disadvantage of an earlier turn position. There is no penalty for tiles left in your rack; in a game that can run for days, ending on a subtraction feels like a punishment for having been dealt badly.

7 · How a game ends

• Someone plays out. The bag is empty and a player has no tiles left. The round is still finished, so that everybody has had exactly the same number of turns.
• Everyone passes. If all remaining players pass in a row, the game ends. A skipped turn counts as a pass, or an abandoned game could never finish.
• Nothing is happening. If enough turns go by without a single point being scored — any mixture of passing, swapping and skipping — the game ends as well. Without this rule two players who only ever swap would play forever, which is not a theoretical worry: the simulator found it.
• Resignation. In a duel the game ends immediately. In a group game the others carry on, and the game ends when one active player is left.

Highest score wins. On a tie: fewest turns played, then the highest single move, then the most LOOPs, and if all of that is equal the place is shared — a duel is then a draw.

8 · Three and four players

Group Mode is not a duel with more people in it. With two players every move you do not make is a move your opponent does; with three or four, blocking costs you a turn and helps everyone else equally. That changes the optimal strategy enough to justify its own settings.

• Four players get an 11 × 11 board, because a 9 × 9 fills up before everyone has had their say. A host who wants a tighter, meaner game can choose 9 × 9 anyway.
• Miss three turns in a row and you are dropped from the game, with a message in the chat so nobody is left guessing.
• Group games are not ranked. The result depends too much on who happened to sit where.
• Coloured markers show who placed which tile — only in group games, where the question actually comes up.

9 · Who sees what

Everyone in the game sees the board, every score, the turn order, how many tiles are left in the bag and how many tiles each player is holding. Nobody sees the contents of anyone else's rack, and nobody — including the server's own responses to you — is told which tiles are still in the bag or in what order they will come out.

Legality and scoring are decided by the server, never by the app. The app draws the same conclusion locally so that a move feels instant, but if the two ever disagreed the server's answer is the one that counts.