AGASPIBU: Sling Siege

You have a sling band at your end of the table, three pucks in the rack beside it, and a fixed budget of shots. Pull a puck back into the band. Feel the draw. Let go. Then watch it work — through a timber arch, into the stone base of a keep, and back down the field to your hand, ready to fire again. You never run out of pucks. You run out of shots. ONE THUMB, ONE VERB Press, drag, release. Direction comes from the band's geometry, power from how far you pull it back, spin from where across the band you loaded. Nothing else to learn, and a long time before you run out of angles to read. THE COLLAPSE IS THE POINT Six kinds of building, told apart by how they fail. Knock a leg out of an arch and the lintel comes down. Topple a tower. Breach a rampart. Take the base of a keep and drop the storey onto whatever was sheltering behind it. Ziggurats are too stable to knock over — those you dismantle. Timber breaks on a decent hit. Stone holds everything else up. Crystal is nearly free to break and worth three times as much, so the shot that scores best is almost never the shot that wins. AN ARMY THAT STANDS ITS GROUND Foals, Lancers and Sorcerers hold the field in ranks, each posted with the structure it garrisons. Hit one hard enough and it falls. Tip one past its balance and it stays down. You will not find one standing in the open — the garrison knows better than that. 74 ARENAS, EIGHT CHAPTERS Muster. Palisade. Watchtowers. The Village. Keeps. Ziggurats. Crystal Seams. Last Stand. Each chapter brings in one new kind of building, then combines it with everything already on the table. Bumpers, holes, magnets and spinners arrive later, once angle, power and collapse are already in your hands. THREE STARS THAT PULL APART One for clearing the field. One for clearing it with shots to spare. One for wrecking three-quarters of everything on it — which you cannot do while saving shots. Three-starring an arena takes two runs and two different reads of it. NO CLOCK A battlefield does not have one. Take the shot when the field has finished moving. Battles run under two minutes. Portrait, one hand, and it works with the plane in flight mode.