PALACE

GOAL
Break your opponent below four spheres. Each side starts with eight (board + reserve).

ONE BUILDING
The palace is the whole board — five 8×2 glass bands, heights 1 to 3, starting 1-2-3-2-1. Your eight spare spheres wait off-board, one lined up before each column of your entrance row — each can only enter on its own column.

ROLL
The roll is the only way a sphere moves. One action per turn: PLACE a sphere onto its own free level-1 entrance pane, or ROLL one sphere — a single committed slide in a straight line, resolved by the terrain it crosses:

• Flat — keep rolling until a wall or a sphere. There is no railing: roll off the building's edge and the sphere falls and shatters — gone.
• One step up — hop up onto the next pane and stop — but only from the pane right below the step. A flat run that reaches a rise later just stops at the wall.
• Two-plus up — a wall; stop before it.
• One step down — drop and keep rolling on the lower level.
• Two-plus down — drop and stay where you land.

CAROM
Roll into a sphere on the same tier and you shove it exactly one pane along, taking the pane it vacated. Shove a foe over the rim to break it — but a sphere backed by a step, a wall, or another sphere won't budge, and rolling too far sends your own sphere over the edge.

SMASH
A sphere you drop onto — of either colour — is smashed and removed from the game; you take its pane. Get above your foe and roll down onto them. Beware smashing your own.

THE BANDS
Whole bands rise and sink via the gold handles on the west edge (or LEVEL CONTROL in the menu). Spheres ride their band. Raising a band by two makes an impassable wall; by one, a step you can hop. Lower the ground to turn a foe's flat roll into a fatal drop — terrain is how you set up the kill.