CIRISGame

CIRISGame is a quiet four-player game that plays out inside a glowing 3D crystal of glass marbles. It's also a small, playable picture of a serious idea from CIRIS: when something grows too big and collapses, the collapse can create, not just destroy.

The idea in one line

Don't let any of your groups grow to seven.

How to play

Four players — the stewards — each own one colour:

• Sienna (clay-orange)
• Lapis (blue)
• Verdigris (green)
• Kaolin (off-white)

On your turn you place one marble of your colour on any empty spot. Then:

• Marbles connect. When two of your marbles sit next to each other they automatically join into a group (a "mesh"), shown by a glowing glass tube between them. Groups can be any size and can merge.
• The one rule — seven is too many. The moment one of your groups reaches seven marbles, it collapses.
• Collapse creates. The collapsed group breaks apart: some marbles come back as small live pairs of your colour, and the rest become dead green cells that stay on the board forever — obstacles everyone has to play around.
• Your score is your dead green cells. Fewer is better. When the board fills up, the player with the fewest dead cells wins.
• Or everybody wins (WILD). If every player finishes with zero dead cells, the whole board lights up in a shared celebration — the cooperative ending.

You can never capture or remove another player's marbles. The only thing that can kill your marbles is your own group growing too big. So the game is about restraint: grow and connect, but don't tip over seven.

The board

The play space is a 3D crystal lattice — a rhombic-dodecahedral (FCC) honeycomb, the 3D cousin of a hex grid. Each marble can connect to up to 12 nearby same-colour marbles. Marbles on the edges and corners have fewer neighbours, so a corner is a calmer (but lonelier) place to play. The default board has 63 spots.

Seeing it

• Topology dial (top-left): rotate the same game through different shapes — cube → sphere → cylinder → torus → Möbius — to read the structure from every angle. Click a marker to jump to a shape, or drag to scrub between them.
• Steward signets: four glowing glass shapes float out at the edges (a cube, a ring, a gem, a Möbius strip), one per player; the player whose turn it is glows brightest. With the coloured glow over the top and bottom of space, they tell you which way is up.
• Tendrils: hover over a marble to see soft tendrils of light reaching to the spots it could connect to.
• Everything floats in deep black space.

Players

Humans or computer. Computer players come in Easy / Medium / Hard / Brutal — all think for the same 2 seconds. By default the game runs as a screensaver: four computer players, quietly playing on forever.

Run it

Play in a browser: https://cirisai.github.io/CIRISGame/

Build and run locally (Rust + Bevy):

cargo run -p ciris-game-engine                    # native window
cargo run -p ciris-game-engine -- --screensaver   # boot straight into the screensaver

Why

The "collapse is generative" idea comes from CIRIS's coherence-collapse work. The deeper story — and how the game maps onto it — is in MISSION.md. The full spec is in docs/DESIGN_BRIEF.md.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later.