ShadowPoint™
The Board
How to Play
Ten lenses. One board.
You play Blue: the white pieces on the blue half. Red is the computer.
Click a piece, then a lit square.
Win by taking Red's king or holding 3 glowing nodes.
How it plays stays on this page. Use Leave on the board to come back here.
Full rules
The board is octagons, squares, and points. A move that matters asks a question. The board adds drones, node powers, How Sure, Second Look, field review, and the walk.
How You Win. Take Red's king, or hold enough nodes: three at Initiate, four at Observer, all five from Analyst on. You lose if Red takes your king or holds all five nodes. When the rung's turns run out (80, or 60 at Operator), time is called. The match then ends with no winner.
Select a lens, move it, and answer when the move captures, crosses a diagonal, lands on a point, claims a node, or sets or breaks a drone. A straight step from octagon to octagon is free. A miss holds the piece. When Red attacks one of your pieces, you answer in that piece's lens: name it and the attack fails.
Field review stays with the match. Notes you keep from Practice stay on this device, next to your rank.
How Rank Works
Ranks come from practice points, lessons, and cases. The ladder is on Profile.
The Ten Lenses
Blue asks the question. Red is the failure that uses the same move. Open a lens for what it means, what it does, and how it moves.
LP · LastPsyOpOpenCloseCandor · What is trying to shape perception?
Meaning. The question of influence: what is being selected, ordered, and timed so a conclusion arrives before you have checked it.
Does. It may set a drone on any open square along a clear diagonal. The drone closes that diagonal to the other side until a piece breaks it.
Moves. Any direction, any distance.
Red · Apate
deceit
ΑΠΑΤΗ
Meaning. Hesiod names her a child of Night. She wears true facts, arranged so the false conclusion feels like your own.
Does. From Analyst up, she may set a drone on any open square along a clear diagonal. She uses that reach so the selection is never questioned. The work is omission, emphasis, and timing.
Moves. Any direction, any distance.
Counter. Ask what was left out, what was put first, and what you were meant to feel.
SN · SentinelOpenCloseIntegrity · Is the institution doing what it claims?
Meaning. Integrity on a case: whether the institution is doing the thing, or only reporting that it did.
Does. It runs any open line, rank or file, end to end. A failure is treated as incompetence until the evidence says otherwise.
Moves. Straight, any distance.
Red · Dolos
guile
ΔΟΛΟΣ
Meaning. In a fable of Phaedrus, Dolos copied Truth and ran out of clay at the feet, so the statue stood and could not walk.
Does. The report, the ceremony, and the dashboard stand in for the work, and the line still looks held.
Moves. Straight, any distance.
Counter. Ask for the outcome, and then walk the line yourself.
PH · PhainomenonOpenCloseObservation · What are we actually observing?
Meaning. Observation kept apart from the story about it. What was seen is not why it happened.
Does. A move on the diagonal asks one question, for the whole path. That question is the cost of treating the observation as checked.
Moves. On the diagonal, any distance, crossing a square each step.
Red · Phantasma
apparition
ΦΑΝΤΑΣΜΑ
Meaning. A phantasma is an appearance: the picture the mind adds to what the eye received.
Does. The cause arrives with the fact and is treated as if it had been observed too.
Moves. On the diagonal, any distance, crossing a square each step.
Counter. Write what you saw on one line and why you think it happened on another.
KT · KatorthomaOpenCloseRigor · Does the system lead to the claimed end state?
Meaning. Rigor about the end state. Activity is not arrival, and a plan is judged by where it lands.
Does. The landing is the claim. If what arrived is not the end state that was named, the leap proves nothing.
Moves. Exactly three straight, leaping anything between.
Red · Mataios
futility
ΜΑΤΑΙΟΣ
Meaning. Mataios means empty, in vain. The Greek of Ecclesiastes uses the noun for vanity of vanities.
Does. It always lands exactly three away and calls that progress. Meetings, money, and renamed milestones stand where an outcome should be.
Moves. Exactly three straight, leaping anything between.
Counter. Ask what arrived, not what was scheduled, and compare it to what was promised.
KR · KraterosOpenCloseFortitude · What happens when this system is stressed?
Meaning. Fortitude under load. A plan that has never been stressed is not yet a plan.
Does. It is not the king. The first capture against it fails: the attacker stays where it was, and this piece stands.
Moves. One step, any direction.
Red · Asthenia
brittleness
ΑΣΘΕΝΕΙΑ
Meaning. Asthenia is the Greek word for weakness and sickness. It holds on a quiet day and gives way at the first real load.
Does. It is not hardened. The first capture removes it. It was never tested under pressure.
Moves. One step, any direction.
Counter. Ask what breaks first, and what breaks next under load.
NK · NoetikonOpenCloseInquiry · What model best explains the problem?
Meaning. Inquiry after the model underneath a problem, not the details stacked on a wrong one.
Does. It leaves the line everyone is watching and comes in from a square that line does not cover.
Moves. Two straight and one to the side, leaping anything between.
Red · Amathia
willful ignorance
ΑΜΑΘΙΑ
Meaning. In Plato's Laws, amathia is seeing what is good and loving something else.
Does. It leaps the same way but lands on the familiar argument. It argues the surface so the model underneath is never opened.
Moves. Two straight and one to the side, leaping anything between.
Counter. Name the model each side is using. The details will not settle it.
AP · ApokalypsisOpenCloseRestraint · What becomes visible in the gaps?
Meaning. Restraint in a gap. An absence is a question, not a finding.
Does. It will not claim an empty square that has company. An absence counts only when it is truly empty.
Moves. Up to three straight; an empty landing only where nothing stands beside it.
Red · Hyponoia
suspicion of everything
ΥΠΟΝΟΙΑ
Meaning. Hyponoia is an under-sense. Taken too far, every silence becomes a message, and always one that confirms the plot already believed.
Does. Every gap is spent as proof. Nothing is left that a later fact could count against.
Moves. Up to three straight; an empty landing only where nothing stands beside it.
Counter. Ask what would change your mind, and mean that answer.
NM · NomosyneOpenCloseHonor · What rules actually govern this?
Meaning. Honor inside bounds that can be named. What a rule says and what it does are two questions.
Does. It stops at four even when the line beyond is open. The bound is part of the move.
Moves. Straight, up to four.
Red · Anomia
lawlessness
ΑΝΟΜΙΑ
Meaning. Anomia is being without law. Through French it became Durkheim's anomie: shared norms have come apart.
Does. The letter is used when it helps and dropped when it does not. The bound is treated as a suggestion.
Moves. Straight, up to four.
Counter. Ask which rule is operating, and for whom it binds.
CH · ChronarkOpenCloseMemory · How did this become what it is now?
Meaning. Memory of sequence. What was known, and when, comes before the judgment.
Does. Once per match, it may step back to the empty square it just left. The step itself is free; a point or a node still asks. Once made, it is used up. A miss leaves it unspent.
Moves. Up to two straight.
Red · Lethe
oblivion
ΛΗΘΗ
Meaning. Lethe is the river of forgetting. Aletheia, truth, is usually read as its undoing: un-forgetting.
Does. It cannot step back. It judges a moment by knowledge nobody there had yet.
Moves. Up to two straight.
Counter. Date each fact before you use it against the people who did not yet have it.
SY · SynthetonOpenCloseClarity · How do the layers interact as one system?
Meaning. Clarity when the lenses are brought together, each finding still tagged to the lens that produced it.
Does. This is the king: lose it and the match ends. It may set a drone on one open square at its corners.
Moves. One step, any direction.
Red · Synchysis
confusion
ΣΥΓΧΥΣΙΣ
Meaning. Synchysis is a pouring-together. In rhetoric, words so scrambled that the sense cannot be checked.
Does. Red's king: take it and Blue wins. From Analyst up, it may set a drone on one open square at its corners. It stirs the source out of every finding.
Moves. One step, any direction.
Counter. Keep which lens produced each finding. Synthesis that erases a source is not synthesis.
The Recruit
One step forward. On the far rank, Blue rises as the lens it is missing most, and Echo rises as the failure of that lens.
IN · RecruitOpenCloseNot a lens.
Meaning. The smallest piece. It starts from one thing that can be checked.
Does. On the far rank it rises as the strongest lens its side has lost; if none is lost, it rises as Noetikon. As Krateros it takes the first-hit shield; as Chronark, the one step back.
Moves. One step forward onto an empty octagon; takes on the forward diagonal, or a drone in the square between.
Red · Echo
the carried voice
ΗΧΩ
Meaning. In Ovid, Echo is cursed to say nothing of her own, only the last words she heard.
Does. On the far rank she rises too, as the failure of the lens her side is missing most. Until then she only carries the last line she heard.
Moves. One step forward onto an empty octagon; takes on the forward diagonal, or a drone in the square between.
Counter. Ask who authored it. Count independent sources, not repetitions of one.