Here's the rules as I remember them.
The orbs are released from taps and can be either yellow, green, red, or blue. Sometimes an unstable orb will appear which will absorb the colour of any orb that it touches, these give extra points and can be usefull when struggling to complete a spinner.
Each level has spinners connected via paths and bridges, the orbs will travel freely until the either fall down a hole or get stuck in a spinner. Spinners are the round things with slots for the orbs to sit in. Every spinner starts off armed, the aim is to disarm every spinner using the orbs of an appropriate colour. When the spinner has white lights emitting from each slot, you can place and group of 4 same coloured orbs to disarm the spinner. Often you'll need to group the orbs in the right colour for each slot before the spinner will disarm. Orbs are destroyed when a spinner is disarmed but also when the spinner has already been dealt with, this enables you to gain extra points as well as keep the board clean. Extra bonus points are awarded for nice tidy boards when completing a level.
You can rotate the spinners by right clicking the centre and release a trapped orb by left clicking on it.
Orderlights are shaped like traffic lights and behave in much the same way. You have to destroy 4 orbs of the indicated colour to disarm the light, there's 3 colours in the orderlight that have to be disarmed in order of top to bottom. The orderlights are evil, don't waste orbs when you have to worry about the orderlights because you can't complete a level with an active orderlight.
Along with spinners, sometimes you'll find pipes, straight and bendy that you can also rotate to direct the orbs. You can't rotate a pipe when there's an orb inside, timing is important so learn how fast the pipes and spinners can turn.
That's as much control as you have over proceedings, right click to rotate a spinner or pipe, left click to dislodge and orb from a spinner. Simple as quantum physics.
Some levels have time limits, but seeing as how your hardly in control of time, it's not exactly a digital clock; guage your time on the hourglass and hope that those last grains of sand are putting up a fight. Taps can only stand so many orbs rolling around, so if the board gets too busy they can't release their orb and can get overloaded. When the taps start rattling and sputing orb puss, you should certainly get some orbs into spinners before it's too late. Running out of time or getting overloaded will result in the loss of a life token. An extra life is awarded for every 3000 points.
The board is also populated with traps and devices that will affect the orbs:
Sprayers.
These are like little jars of paint, upside down on a little stand - They will spray any orbs that pass under them whatever colour they are. Sprayers are your friend.
Blockers.
Blockers are annoying barriers that will only let the orbs pass if they are going in the right direction, or if they match the blockers colour spot. Orbs that don't pass muster will be sent back.
Holes.
Orbs will simply fall down these, which is nice - only if you were'nt relying on that colour
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Game progress is automatically saved, just select Continue to keep going from your latest level. There's 25 levels in all.
I won't mention my high score, but the highest score from Babs is 55634, which took about 4 hours
- Babs is hardcore!.
Van-B
