How to play Kalabux

Kalabux is a puzzle about colour wrapped in a small factory to run. You pipe the three primary paints out of their vats, mix them where the pipes meet, and fill each customer's jar with exactly the colour they ordered — then spend what you earn making the works bigger. Here is how a day goes.

The shape of a day

1. The morning post. Every day starts with the letters, opened one at a time: new orders, rush jobs due by close of play, vouchers, a supplier's price rise, a customer paying in advance, a review in the local paper, word of the colour everyone wants this week, notice that an inspector is coming. Some of it pays and some of it costs; none of it can be ignored.
2. The work shift. Lay and rotate pipe parts on the machine's grid to route paint from the vats to the waiting jars. When the layout is right, pull the big lever: the mix runs, the jars fill, and the lorry takes the finished orders away.
3. The maintenance shift. Come evening the works falls quiet. Buy fresh paint for the vats, scrub dried splats off the parts, mend worn seals and leaking joints before the whistle goes again, and put your takings into upgrades and research.
4. A second shift (later). Win the council's approval and take out a licence, and the works can run a second shift, with Old Silas taking the floor at two.

Laying pipe

Tap to place a part; tap again to rotate it. The parts you'll use:

• Straights and bends carry a stream across the grid.
• Splitters divide one stream into two, so a single vat can feed several orders at once.
• Hubs (four-way, and later crow's-foot) are where streams meet — and where colours mix.
• The crossover, once researched, lets two streams cross without mixing. Until you have it, every meeting point is a mix.

The puzzle is fitting all of that into a cramped grid. Get it right and the paint flows; get it wrong and you'll be mopping up leaks. Parts wear with use, so a layout that worked last week may need a seal or two before it works again.

Which colours mix into which

You start with red, yellow and blue. Where two streams meet, they combine the way paint does:

Proportion matters. Two parts red to one part yellow is a different orange from equal parts, so the shade a jar asks for tells you how to split the lines feeding it.

Shades, tints and tones. Research the black and white tanks and the whole trade opens up. A drop of black deepens a colour — dark red, bottle green. A drop of white pales it — pink, sky blue. Both together give a muted tone with the fire taken out. Forty-six colours in all, from three primaries.

Orders, deadlines and the lorry

Orders arrive on a live demand line with deadlines measured in days, plus the occasional premium rush job due the same day. A jar is only right when the colour is exact. The lorry takes the finished jars at the end of the shift; keep on top of your orders and new colours arrive sooner.

Money, upgrades and research

Filled orders earn coin. Reinvest it in the parts shop, the upgrades workshop and the R&D lab — all three show from your first day with the day each opens, and Silas counts down to them in the night's report. The upgrades workshop opens bay by bay between days 10 and 15. Spend on:

• Paint to keep the vats full.
• Repairs — worn seals and leaks cost you a shift if you let them.
• Bigger tanks, a bigger lorry, a bigger warehouse.
• Research: new parts such as crow's-foot hubs, skew crosses and the crossover, and the black and white tanks.

Your standing with the town

What you ship, and when, sets your standing, and your standing sets what a jar fetches. An inspector grades the works out of five stars. The trade board sends framed certificates for milestones — a month without a late jar, fifty clean mixes, the day you brew every colour in the trade — and Old Silas hangs them himself. There is a summit to it: run the works well enough for long enough and word reaches the borough, with a commission from the mayor and a grand clock raised over your floor to stay there for good. The works keeps running afterwards; the clock just tells everyone what you did.

Old Silas

Your uncle's foreman walks you through the first day hands-on and chimes in with tips after that. If you're genuinely stuck on a layout, ask him: his pointing finger will work out a route for you, one step at a time. He'll also send word when the works needs you, if you'd like him to — never more than a note or two, and you can turn it off under Options.

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