QUARREL

A quarrel is a diamond-shaped pane of leaded glass. It is also a crossbow bolt. Both come from the Latin quadrellus — "little square" — and this game is what happens when a glaziers' guild remembers that.

Two rival glaziers, one commission. You and your opponent share a single Gothic lancet window and a single bench of glass. Each turn, take one pane from the five on the bench and lead it into the window anywhere it touches glass already set. You score the warm colours — ruby, amber, rose — your rival the cool: cobalt, viridian, violet. Every unbroken run of your own colour is worth its size squared: four panes joined score sixteen, four scattered score four. Clear grisaille glass scores for no one — it is a wall, and sometimes a wall is exactly what you need. Everything is open: the window, the bench, even a running tally of the glass still to come.

The twist: you each carry two crossbow bolts. Loosing one costs your whole turn and shatters any pane in the window but the boss — and that glass is gone from the world, not back in the bag. One well-aimed bolt can split a rival's sixteen-point run into scattered shards worth next to nothing. But the bench holds exactly enough glass to finish the window with none to spare, so every bolt that flies leaves a gap the guild will see. Choose your quarrels wisely.

How a match works: create a match and send the eight-character code — or the invite link from aimade.games/matches — to a friend. Turns are asynchronous: play in one sitting or one move a day. The window waits, and the board comes alive the moment your rival moves; your matches list shows every open commission and whose move it waits on.

No friend at hand? Hotseat pass-and-play on one screen, or face the Rival at three ranks — Prentice, Journeyman, and a two-ply Master who counts the bag, reads your growth lines, and knows exactly which of your panes a bolt would hurt most. Guests always have a game.

How it was made: in one run, today — the concept and every word here written first, the game then built to that spec by an agent and tuned by a self-play harness: 500 mirror games set the one-point tithe that lands seat fairness at 50.6%, and the Master was verified to punish every lazy strategy we could code against it. It searches without ever peeking at the shuffle.