Hot Potato

Nobody can see a countdown. The relic hovers over the altar for three seconds, picks someone at random and starts to burn, for anything between 12 and 22 seconds. Not even the person holding it knows how long. When it goes it takes only whoever has it and throws everyone nearby off their feet, and then the next fuse starts. With two players a round is a single fuse. With sixteen it is fifteen of them, several burning at once.

Reading the ring

The carrier wears a ring on the floor: a faint disc 2 metres round them and an arc of chevrons across the 100 degrees in front. That drawing is the pass, exactly. If any part of your body is inside the arc, within 2 metres, with no obelisk between you, their next shove hands you the relic. Beside them or behind them, you are safe.

The ring's colour tells you how long the relic has burned, never how long it has left. It is gold for the first 6 seconds, orange until 11, then red. Every relic turns red before it goes, and a red one might go that second or ten seconds later.

One shove, two meanings

• Q Shove, every 1.2 seconds. If you are the carrier, this is the pass: the relic goes to the nearest clean player the shove reaches, and they are thrown about 4 metres away from you. Anyone else in the arc is knocked back. If you are clean, a shove knocks its target about 2 metres and stuns them for 0.6 seconds. A carrier is knocked back but never stunned, and becoming the carrier ends any stun you were under.
• E Dash, every 3 seconds, is a short burst forward: to close the last metre as the carrier, or to get out of the arc as everyone else.
• Space jumps, onto the altar or over a sarcophagus.

The carrier runs 10% faster than everyone else. In a straight line across open floor that wins in the end. Round a pillar it does not.

The court

The altar sits in the middle, a 0.6-metre step up. Sarcophagi lie on a ring halfway out: chest-high, easy to hop, and a pass goes straight over them. Obelisks stand further out, 3.4-metre stone shafts too tall to climb, and a pass cannot go through one. A wall runs round the edge, so nobody falls out, but the wall stops a pass too, and a carrier can pin you against it.

One relic burns for every four players still alive, counted again after every blast: one while fewer than eight are alive, two from eight, three from twelve, four at sixteen. The blast that takes eight down to seven does not light a replacement. The court is 17 metres across for two or three players and 26 metres for sixteen, with 4 obelisks up to 7 players, 6 from 8 to 14 and 8 above that, and as many sarcophagi.

How good players survive it

• Keep an obelisk between you and the carrier and circle it, reversing as they come round. A shaft that narrow cancels their speed edge.
• Juke across the carrier's front just as they commit. The arc only covers what is in front of them, and a shove that misses costs them 1.2 seconds.
• As the carrier, line up before you press. The pass goes to the nearest clean body in the arc, not the one you were chasing. Dash to close, then shove.
• A clean shove is a weapon too. A stunned player cannot walk for 0.6 seconds, which is plenty for a carrier who is already close.
• After a pass, run the other way. The new carrier has just been thrown 4 metres from you.
• When the ring is red, keep more than 2.5 metres away. The blast will not take you out, but it can throw you into another carrier's arc.

After a blast

The holder comes back as a ghost. A ghost's Q is a gust with a shove's reach and two thirds of its push, every 8 seconds. It never stuns or passes the relic, but it goes straight through stone, and it can blow a runner into a carrier's arc or a carrier past the person they were closing on.