ORRERY

HOW THE INSTRUMENT WORKS

1. Each chart hides a set of kindred words — same theme, same length. Their letters are strewn across the rings among decoys: first letters on the inner ring, last letters at the rim. Only the theme and the count are given. Set the night’s difficulty before you begin: a clear sky holds no decoys; crowded skies hide more — and pay a higher score. Every chart is kept in the atlas, gathered under the figure it belongs to.
2. Drag any ring to turn it, or select one below the instrument and use ← →. Each ring you settle costs one turn, however far it travelled. Dragged or stepped, the ring stays in your hand — its halo brightens, and nothing is read from it — until it settles a moment after you stop, so a word that only lines up in passing on the way somewhere else is not taken. Take hold of the same ring again to carry on with the move; press Enter, or touch the instrument, to settle it at once.
3. Spell a hidden word along any meridian, reading center outward, and it is captured: the word flares gold and its letters burn out of the rings, leaving empty sockets behind.
4. Capture every word to clear the sky. Finish at or under par for a flawless ✦✦✦. Your score is 1000 × par ÷ turns, docked for revealed letters — par play scores 1000, sharper play scores higher. Bests are kept per chart, and an unfinished game waits for you in Through the Eyepiece. Charts gather into constellations in the Firmament: kindle every star of a figure to unlock its Crown — a final chart under a Starless Dark sky (five decoys, ×3 score) — and give the figure its name. Flawless ✦✦✦ stars each reveal one Crown word.
5. Reveal a letter spells one more letter of a hidden word into the tray, finishing that word before starting another. A whole word costs what a whole word always did — 15% — so a single letter of a four-letter word costs about 4%. Take one letter, or take the lot.
6. Press the star at the hub to open a sighting. It captures nothing by itself: it changes what the instrument can read, and words are still taken the moment a ring snaps into place. For four turns — and one more for every decoy in the sky — it reads orbits as well as meridians: a word spiralling outward, each letter one spoke further round than the last. An orbit never settles on its own, however neatly it lines up. Opening a sighting costs a turn, and with no keystone left to read the star will not open one at all.
7. One letter on every chart wears a turning ring: the keystone. Two of the hidden words share the letter sitting in it, so a single cell can serve them both — a meridian running out through it, an orbit spiralling away along it. Which ring it sits on decides how the pair looks: they cross over the keystone, spring apart from it, or meet upon it. Bring both home on the same turn and you take two words for the price of one, at ×2.5 — far and away the cheapest thing you can do on the board. It is the only thing a sighting can do, and doing it spends the keystone and closes the sighting.
8. The Chart of the Day is the same puzzle for every player, always at Working Sky so scores compare. Solve it to keep your streak, and share the result — the strip of stars gives away no letters.

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