Stone Quay Claims

Sofware by Kynsi

About this app

Stone Quay Claims is a quiet, offline board game about walls, corners, and the ground between them.

You and one stubborn rival share a ten by ten walled town square. Each of you owns the same twelve buildings, from a single marker stone up to five square halls. On your turn you set one of them down on empty ground. That is the whole of it, and it is nothing like as simple as it sounds.

The moment a placement closes a ring, everything inside it changes hands. Any pocket of ground shut off by your buildings and the town wall becomes yours, tinted in your colour, and from then on your rival may not build there at all. If a single foreign building happens to be standing inside that pocket, it is lifted off the board and handed straight back to its owner. Two foreign buildings inside and the pocket holds, so the craft of the game is cutting one big open space into small ones.

A neutral great hall sits in the middle of the argument. It belongs to nobody, it blocks both of you, and it counts as the one foreign building a pocket is allowed, which makes walling it in one of the most satisfying moves on the board.

The match ends when neither side can place anything at all. Add up the squares still sitting in reserve, and the smaller pile wins. Because captured buildings go back into their owner reserve, one good wall late on can turn a lost match around.

THREE RIVALS
- Apprentice builds anywhere legal and is a gentle place to learn the shapes.
- Journeyman looks one move ahead and takes the ground it can see.
- Master Mason searches two moves deep along the existing walls, where the real moves are, and will not hand you easy corners.

WHAT IS INSIDE
- A ten by ten square, twelve buildings a side, and one neutral hall.
- Drag across the board to place, tap a building to turn it, double tap to mirror it.
- Choose who opens and how the neutral hall is sited, or leave the hall out entirely.
- A ledger of every match: wins, ground claimed, buildings returned, your largest single claim, and your best finish.
- Eight mason marks to cut, from your very first win to a win over the Master Mason.
- Everything drawn as flat stone and mortar. No photographs, no clutter, no flashing.

COMPLETELY OFFLINE
There is no internet connection, no account, no advertising, no analytics, and no in app purchase of any kind. There is also no sound at all: the only feedback beyond the board itself is an optional short haptic tap when a stone lands, and you can switch that off too. Your ledger and your settings are stored on your device and nowhere else.

Portrait, dark, and made to be played one careful move at a time.