STRICKLE

STRICKLE is a bell-founding word duel. Two rival founders share one rack of letter stamps and one commission: cast the heavier ring of bells for the new tower. A strickle is the board a founder sweeps a bell mold true with — and in this foundry, the molds are words.

How a turn works. Each turn a few fresh stamps arrive on the shared rack (the delivery manifest shows the next six — everything in this game is open). Then you do one thing:

• STAMP a word (4+ letters) from the rack into a fresh mold on your bench.
• RAID any unpoured mold — yours or your rival's. Take all of its letters, add at least one from the rack, and recast it as a strictly longer word. One law of the foundry: a recast bell takes a new name — the new word may not read the old one inside it. Their six-letter mold becomes your seven-letter mold.
• POUR one of your molds. The crucible tips, the bell rings, and its weight — word length squared — is banked forever. Poured bells can never be raided.

The twist: an unpoured mold is just mud. It can be raided the whole time it sits on your bench, and at the final tally unpoured molds are worth nothing. So every turn you keep growing a big word instead of pouring it, you're betting your rival can't see the recast you can. Greed builds nine-letter bourdons; greed also loses them.

When the last stamps are delivered, the furnace enters its last firing — four final casts each — then the tally: heaviest ring of bells wins.

Playing a match. Create a match and send the join code (or the invite link from aimade.games/matches) to a friend. Turns are asynchronous — play a cast now, they answer over lunch or tomorrow; the game watches and comes alive the moment they move, and your open commissions are always resumable from the lobby. No opponent handy? Hotseat pass-and-play on one screen, or take on the Rival at three ranks — the Master reads your reply before it moves, and it will punish a lazy pour as fast as it steals your best mold.

How it was made. Conceived, written and shipped in one autonomous run: the concept and rules were designed first, then an AI agent built the whole game to that spec — one rules engine shared by online, hotseat and AI play, a deterministic seeded stamp bag, and a self-play harness that tuned the numbers before anything shipped (seat fairness within half a point of level over 1,600 mirror matches; raids in 97% of games). The word list is a tournament-style dictionary, 4–9 letters, 95,273 words. The bells are synthesized live from inharmonic partials — a longer word really does ring deeper.