Spendii

A strategic multiplayer game about building permanent discounts, collecting points, and managing a position bid that can help or hinder your start.

Room setup

The host selects a target score from 6 to 21, a 100-round maximum, a game clock, a deck, position assignment, anonymity, human and bot counts, and whether the final position is NO PLAY. There must be 2-5 active playing positions.

• Random positions: positions are shuffled and all active players begin at 0 points.
• Betting positions: each participant bids points for every position before choosing a starting position.
• NO PLAY: the participant assigned this position watches the game without taking turns.
• Bot move: when enabled in Advanced settings, active human players can privately ask what the bot strategy would do. During a player's live turn, Bot move shows only the current stage and recalculates after each submitted stage because a main action can reveal a held or replacement market card that may affect later excess-chip returns or bonus-tile choices. Predicting with face-down server information would leak it, while ignoring that information could make the advice inaccurate. During another player's turn or gameplay playback, Bot move can instead show the requesting player's latest relevant completed turn as an ordered list reconstructed from the authoritative stage snapshots. The same private history remains available when viewing a completed game. Viewers and the participant assigned NO PLAY receive no preview.

Betting for positions

In betting mode, every bid must be an integer between the negative and positive target score, and all of a participant's bids must total 0. Lower bids receive better rank. Beginning with first rank, participants privately select an available position from one of their highlighted ranked cells. Selections are revealed together after everyone required for that rank has chosen.

Board setup

• Active players act in position order: A, B, C, D, then E.
• Four development cards from each of the three tiers are face up.
• The board has one more bonus tile than active players.
• The bank begins with 2-9 regular chips of each color and 0-6 gold wild chips, as selected in the room settings. Regular chips default to 7 and use player-count presets of 4, 5, 7, and 8 for 2, 3, 4, and 5 active players; gold defaults to 5.
• A betting-mode player's starting points equal the bid for their selected position.

Your turn

Choose exactly one main action:

1. Take chips: take 1 chip; 2 or 3 different available colors; or 2 matching chips when at least 4 of that color are in the bank.
2. Hold a card: hold a face-up card or the top hidden card from a tier. You may hold at most 3 cards and receive a gold chip when one is available.
3. Buy a card: pay for a face-up or personally held card. Permanent discounts reduce colored costs and gold covers remaining colored costs. The room's Card payment setting defaults to using the least gold by spending matching colored chips first. If the room uses choose manually and more than one payment is possible, choose the number of each held chip to spend before confirming the purchase.
4. Pass: take no main action. Any required follow-up still has to be completed.

Turn limits and bonus tiles

• You may hold at most 10 chips after your turn. If you exceed the limit, return exactly the excess.
• After the main action and any chip return, the game checks bonus-tile eligibility using permanent card discounts.
• If one or more tiles are available, choose exactly one before the turn ends.
• The game clock continues during required chip returns and bonus-tile choices. The increment is added only when the entire turn finishes.

Game end and ELO calculation

• Reaching the target score starts the final round. Play continues until every active player has received the same number of turns.
• The game ends immediately if every active player cleanly passes in the same round. A pass is clean only when it needs no chip return or bonus-tile choice.
• If neither condition occurs first, the game ends after round 100.
• Spendii ELO uses point totals and existing human-player ratings; purchased development cards are not included. Let pMax be the highest point total among all joined humans and bots. For each human player i, diff_i = pMax - points_i and playerScore_i = diff_i / sum(diff_j), where the sum includes humans only. If all human point totals are equal, every playerScore is 1 / human count. The expected loss-like score is expectedScore_i = 1 / sum(10 ^ ((ELO_i - ELO_j) / 400)), summed over humans only. The new rating is max(1, oldELO - 40 * (playerScore - expectedScore)).

Guests, bots, and ELO

Guests can create bot rooms and spectate public rooms, but guest games are unrated. Bots play automatically and do not receive ELO. Rated games update human participants, including a human assigned NO PLAY, when the game finishes.