Buyout (A Strategy Game)

THE BOARD TAKES THE WHOLE PAGE On iPad the grid sat in one corner with half the sheet left blank, no larger than it was on a phone. It now takes the space it is given: the tiles grow with the screen, and held sideways the floor and the trading desk sit across the page from one another. TURN THE PAPER ANY WAY YOU LIKE Every screen reads in both orientations. On iPad the paper keeps its place in Split View and Slide Over instead of demanding the whole display, and it redraws at whatever size it is handed. MADE FOR IPHONE DUO Opened, the fold divides the paper the way a broadsheet divides — the board on one side of the hinge, the floor and the market listings on the other. Closed, it is the same paper at a smaller size. SAFE FROM TAKEOVER, SAID PLAINLY A company beyond takeover was ruled off with a heavy border around its tiles. It is now stamped across the block instead. The state belongs to the company, not to the tiles it happens to stand on, and the mark now says so. THE LEADERBOARDS ARE ONE TAP AWAY The Record went three taps deep to reach a global table. It now opens straight onto one, with your friends' table a tap from there. THE TRAINING DESK TELLS THE TRUTH Lesson one said a tile may be placed anywhere. It may not, and the lesson now says what actually stops you. The lessons on majorities and on settlement have been rewritten to say what a bonus is worth in dollars, why converting is worth doing, and what holding defunct paper pays if the name never comes back. FOUR RIVALS, FOUR DIFFERENT PLAYERS Greedy and Sharp were the same desk under two names — over four hundred games neither could beat the other. Greedy now plays the board and never the register, and the gap between them is real. The Shark, meanwhile, has stopped handing rivals a bonus on its way past.