Nile Crossing

Nobody gets knocked out in Nile Crossing. Fall in and you are back on the bank a second later, able to move straight away. What a fall costs is distance: every swim sends you back to the bank you started from, or to the sandbar halfway across once you have touched it. The round goes to whoever gets across 44 metres of moving rafts with the fewest of those trips.

The river

The river runs between two banks with a stone sandbar across the middle. Rafts drift sideways across your path in lanes, each lane going the opposite way to the one before it.

The first half is the gentler water. Its lanes carry reed rafts, stone coffins and crocodiles at a steady 2 to 3.5 m/s, and nothing here sinks unless it is crowded. Step onto the sandbar and your checkpoint is saved: from then on a fall puts you back on the sandbar instead of the start.

The second half, the Abyss, is faster, at roughly 3.7 to 5.8 m/s, and every other lane is crocodiles. Here they dive on a five-second cycle: about 2.8 seconds afloat, then just under a second when the whole body turns red and the eyes blaze, then about 1.4 seconds underwater, with a patch of froth showing where it is. Anyone standing on it when it goes under goes in with it. The Abyss reeds will not hold anybody for long either. Alone on one, it starts to sink after a second, glowing orange, and is gone at 1.8.

Two rules hold across the whole river:

• Any raft with two or more people on it glows red and sinks in 1.2 seconds. A sunk raft stays down for at least two seconds, and until it is empty.
• A raft that carries you past the edge of the river drops you in.

At 0:20 a flash flood hits, and for 15 seconds every raft moves 40% faster. Some rounds the current runs faster throughout, and some have shorter rafts.

A fall is under a second of thrashing in the water, then you come up somewhere along the bank (or the sandbar).

The round lasts 60 seconds and ends once everyone but one has crossed. Places go in crossing order, then by how far across the rest got.

Q and E

• Q, Shove (0.8 s). Pushes everyone within 1.6 m directly away from you, in any direction. There is no stun; the water does the rest.
• E, Leap of Faith (3.5 s). A long, high leap the way you are facing. Everyone starts facing the river, so the first one goes across it.

Crossing well

• Do not jump at an empty gap. Stand at the edge of the bank or your raft, let the next raft drift into line, then step across.
• Get to the sandbar before 0:20. The flood speeds up the first half too, and the checkpoint is what makes the Abyss affordable.
• Count the crocodiles. One that has just surfaced gives you nearly three seconds; one that has turned red gives you nothing. Use a crocodile as a step, never as somewhere to wait.
• Treat Abyss reeds the same way. Stone coffins are the place to stand still in the second half.
• Never share. If a rival lands on your raft, leave or shove them off before the 1.2 seconds are up. Landing on theirs and shoving them straight off is the attack.
• Walk against the drift. Rafts carry you sideways, and the far end of every lane is the edge of the river.
• Keep the leap for when the next lane has nothing to step onto: a sunk raft, a diving crocodile, a raft that has just drifted out of reach.

Wider rivers

The river is 20 m wide with two or three players, 24 m with four or five and 28 m from six, with 11, 13 and 15 lanes, one more of them in the Abyss than in the first half. It is 44 m from bank to bank at every size, so more players means lanes packed closer together.