The menu board
Game modes and variants
Four ways to play the same sixty cards. Pick by who is at the table, not by difficulty.
The variants are not a difficulty ladder, and they are not exclusive. Two of them change which cards are legal, one changes the shape of the board, and one changes who gets paid — three independent switches, all set at the start of a game from the same screen, in the browser and on the table alike. Nothing below changes scoring, the wild, or the Final Lap; for those, the rules are the same in every mode.
One Good Match
Best for: Anyone who has not played before, and most tables that have.
A card is legal as long as one pair of touching donuts agrees. Every other edge can clash freely.
Why it plays differently. Almost every card in your tray fits somewhere, so the turn is not "can I place this" but "where is this worth the most". That is the decision the game is built around, and this is the variant that gets you to it fastest.
What to watch. Boxes grow quickly and seal by accident. Count the empty space around a flavour before you feed it.
Perfect Match
Best for: Two people who have played a few and want it to bite.
Every donut you place has to agree with one of the donuts it touches. A single donut with nothing to agree with, anywhere along the seam, and the card cannot go down that way round. A donut sitting in a corner meets two neighbours and owes agreement to either of them rather than both — asking for both would ask one donut to be two flavours at once, which is not a hard placement, it is an impossible one.
Why it plays differently. Legal placements collapse from dozens to a handful, so the board develops in long, clean runs instead of a patchwork — and a Cinnamon Roll, which matches anything, goes from useful to decisive.
What to watch. You will get stuck. Swapping a card is a real move here, not an admission of defeat, and knowing when to take the free turn is most of the skill.
Splitzkies
Best for: People who want the board to stop behaving.
Cards need not line up. A card can sit a single quadrant offset and hang off the side of its neighbour. It is a separate setting from the matching rule, so it plays over One Good Match or Perfect Match as you like.
Why it plays differently. The grid stops being a grid. Regions run diagonally, seams appear where nobody put them, and a card two turns old suddenly borders something it never touched before.
What to watch. Boxes under 3 quadrants do not score, because an offset seals tiny pockets far too easily and without that floor the variant turns into a race to make one-donut boxes.
Coffee’s For Closers
Best for: Groups of three or more, and anyone who found the base game too polite.
Whoever seals a box scores it, no matter who built it.
Why it plays differently. It turns every open box into a shared pot. Building a Catering Order in the open becomes an invitation, and the person who has been quietly holding the one card that closes it is playing a different game to everyone else.
What to watch. Nobody will help you finish anything. Expect boxes to be left one quadrant short for several turns while everyone waits for someone else to blink — and expect that standoff to be broken by someone spending a turn to box it, which makes them the closer.
Can you combine them?
All of them, in any combination. The menu asks three separate questions — how edges match (One Good Match or Perfect Match), whether cards have to line up (Squared Away or Splitzkies), and who gets paid for a box — so Perfect Match played on the Splitzkies lattice with Coffee’s For Closers on is a legal setting, and a genuinely mean one. Splitzkies used to sit in the matching list as though it were a third edge rule; it never was, and it no longer pretends to be.
Next: the full rules, strategy, or a game against the AI.