How to play Swalpa Adjust Maadi
A step-by-step guide to the board, the cards, and the rules.
Competing contractors operate in a Bangalore neighbourhood. Each is trying to supply power and water to as many houses as possible, without much concern for how their actions affect the others. Meanwhile, roads are constantly dug up for Metro work, VIP visits, and floods, wreaking havoc on the infrastructure. The city's residents are left to deal with unpredictable power and water, and must suffer in silence. Here's the twist: you play one of the contractors, while the residents are just mute spectators.
The eight icons above the board show the upcoming cards in the deck. All players use the same deck. The active card is rightmost, highlighted by an orange border. Tap an empty space to preview your card there. Tap the same space again to confirm the move. Tap a different space instead if you want to change your mind before confirming. You cannot place a card on a park, or on the greyed-out square where the previous player just played. After you play your card, all the deck shifts one place to the right for the next player's turn.
The top and bottom of the board are the power supply edges. The left and right of the board are the water supply edges. Each card carries a power path and a water path through it. A space is water-connected once its water path traces, card by card, all the way back to the left or right edge of the board. Power works the same way, tracing back to the top or bottom edge. Here, the newly placed card lets water reach this space for the first time, even though power still does not.
When a space gets connected to both power and water at the same time, a new house appears there. This house is assigned to the player on whose turn this happened, indicated by its roof colour. Houses formed at setup have a grey roof. As soon as you tap a space that would connect both power and water, a preview of the new house appears right there, in your colour, before you've even confirmed the move. Tap the same space again to make it official, as in the previous step.
On your turn, you get one point for each house that belongs to you, and that is simultaneously connected to power and water. Partially-connected houses do not count toward your score, even if you own them. Here, the house at top left already belongs to Player 1 and stays connected to both power and water the whole time, but the score only goes up when it becomes Player 1's turn again, not during the opponent's turn in between.
On your turn, after you place a card on a space, suppose that space contains a house that is disconnected from both power and water. If that house belongs to another player, and it has at least one neighbouring house owned by that same player, the disconnected house switches to your colour once you complete your turn. Here, the purple house just above the bottom left corner loses its connection and flips to orange, since it still had a purple neighbour directly below it.
Roadworks cards are not placed by you. As soon as one is drawn, the game already picks a random existing space and turns it to rubble, and a popup tells you the excuse. The popup disappears on its own after a couple of seconds. The affected space stays marked with an orange dashed border until you tap it to move on; you are only acknowledging what already happened, not choosing where. If Roadworks happens to hit a house, that house and its owner are gone, though a new house can later be built and claimed on that same space.
The cards run out after 20 rounds, and whoever has the higher score at that point wins, and a popup announces it, or announces a tie if the scores match. In Today's game, once that popup closes on its own, a second popup appears right after it, letting you copy your score to share and challenge others to beat it.
Today's game is the same for everyone who plays it on a given day: the board, the deck order, and how the opponent plays are all fixed for that day, so your score is directly comparable with anyone else's. It is always one player against the computer on a 6x6 board.
Every other combination of player count and board size is a random game instead, different each time you play. You can switch modes, player count, or board size at any point, even mid-game, and doing so immediately starts a fresh game.
No matter which player wins, the residents always lose. Swalpa adjust maadi.