Pharaoh's Glyph

Pharaoh's Glyph is a memory test where the floor keeps score. A grid of stone tiles shows its symbols, goes blank, and then one symbol is called. You have a few seconds to walk onto a tile you remember carrying it before every other tile sinks into the quicksand. Nobody chases you and nothing on the board moves until it falls, so each wave sorts the people who remembered from the people who guessed.

Heats and waves

A round is three heats, each on a freshly dealt board, and your three finishes are added up for the round. A heat is four waves, about 50 seconds, and it stops the moment the fourth floor has fallen. Fall in any wave and you watch the rest of that heat, then start the next one with everyone else. One bad call costs you a heat, not the round.

Every wave runs through the same five steps:

• Memorise. Each tile shows its symbol on a coloured face. 5 seconds in wave 1, trimmed a little each wave to about 4 by wave 4.
• Blank. Every face turns to the same dark stone for just over a second.
• Seek. The symbol is named on screen and shown on a plaque either side of the board. 4.5 seconds in wave 1, under 4 by wave 4. In the last second every tile's border flashes gold, all of them equally, so the flash is a countdown and never a hint.
• Collapse. The wrong tiles drop. The survivors show their symbols again, so you can see what you got wrong.
• Reset. About a second while the tiles rise and the next layout is dealt.

The symbol set grows through a heat. Wave 1 uses only the gold sun and the red ankh. Wave 2 adds the green scarab, wave 3 the cyan eye and wave 4 the blue Nile, so the last wave of each heat has five symbols to sort.

The board

Tiles meet edge to edge with no gaps, so you never need to jump to cross. Before the collapse, the only drop is the outer edge of the board. Several players can stand on one tile at once, so a safe tile never has to be fought for.

At up to 4 players the board is 4 tiles by 4. With 5 players it grows to 5 by 5, and with 9 or more it is 6 by 6, all the way to 16, with the camera pulled back to fit. A bigger board holds more copies of each symbol, so it isn't harder to survive, just longer to walk.

The Shove

Q pushes anyone right beside you a short way and recharges in four seconds. In the middle of a solid board it barely matters. It matters at edges: beside the board's rim, and on the rim of a safe tile once the floor around it has gone.

How good players read it

• Learn your row, not the grid. The deal is balanced: every symbol appears the same number of times, give or take one, and every row holds every symbol in play. The one exception is the 4-by-4 board's fourth wave, where a row can be one symbol short and the row beside it has the missing one. The tile you need is never further than the next row.
• Hold colours, not shapes. Each symbol has its own colour during Memorise. A colour and a position are quicker to hold than five drawings.
• Get central before the call. From the middle of the board every tile is a short walk; from a corner the far side isn't.
• Go the moment it's named. By wave 4 you have under four seconds, and crossing the 6-by-6 board from side to side takes more than two of them.
• Finish in the middle of your tile. A rival's shove only drops you if you're near the edge when the floor goes.
• Expect repeats. The call is drawn at random from the symbols on the board each wave, so last wave's symbol can come up again.