Appendix: Pyturis Game Rules

Below are the rules for Pyturis:

The game starts with a main menu. Press (s) to start the game.

You can change different difficulty levels by pressing (d) from the main menu, then press (1), (2), (3), (4), corresponding to Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert, to select a specific level, and press (f) to confirm and return to the main menu. Defaulted to medium.

The game features acceleration, which, if set to “ON”, will make pytromino descend faster and faster in a game. You can toggle acceleration on/off by pressing (a) in the main menu. Defaulted to OFF.

You can press (t) from the main menu to view tutorials, which is basically a concise version of the rules here.

To quit the game, press (q) from the main menu.

The game starts with an empty board. Different pieces (called “pytrominoes”) will descend one by one from the top.

As a pytromino descends, the player will be able to rotate and move it using the arrow keys.

To rotate a piece 90 degrees clockwise, press the (up) arrow key.

To move a piece left and right, press the (left) and (right) arrow keys respectively.

To move a piece down faster, press the (down) arrow key.

To “hard drop” a piece, press the (space) key.

On the right-hand side of the screen, the player will be able to see a preview of the upcoming pytrominoes. To put off using the current pytromino for the one coming up next, a player can put it “on hold” by pressing the (c) key. To exchange the current pytromino with the one that’s held, press (c) again. A player can only “hold” once per pytromino.

A pytromino will stop moving when it either hits the bottom of the board or comes to rest on top of another pytromino. If the placement of the pytromino results in the formation of a continuous horizontal line, this line will disappear. A player’s score increases based on the number of lines they clear, and number of lines they move the pytromino down.

The game ends when a pytromino hits the top of the board and no more lines can be cleared; you can not “win” a game in Pyturis.

When a game ends, press (b) to return to the main menu.

At the beginning of the game, the holder is empty. The first time (c) is pressed, the pytromino will be stored in the holder, and the next pytromino will be dropped from the top. Importantly, each pytromino can only be swapped once in its lifetime; in other words, for each pytromino, only the first time (c) is pressed, does anything happen. The holder is meant to “hold” ONE item at a time.

When the holder is not empty, and a new pytromino is in the center grid, you can press c and the pytromino in the holder will be swapped with the pytromino currently in the center grid. Different from some of the Tetris implementations, Pyturis will not start dropping the swapped pytromino from the top of the center grid, instead, it will start dropping from where the current pytromino is (to make the game a little harder). As a result, if the swap is not possible because the swapping pytromino cannot fit where the current pytromino is, the swap will not happen.