The Apothecary's Bench

A medieval colourman's workshop. Three pigments, eighteen colours, every order an exact volume in an exact ratio. New: a hint on every bench when you're stuck.

You are a colourman in a medieval workshop, and the guild has sent a docket.

There are three pigments on the shelf — orpiment yellow, ultramarine blue, vermilion red — and eighteen colours that can be made from them. Not by choosing ingredients, but by measure. Four parts yellow to two parts blue is sap green. Three to one is reseda. One to one is verdigris. Get the proportion wrong and you have not made nothing; you have made something else, and the crate wanted the other thing.

A pour fills the vessel it goes into, or empties the one it comes from, whichever happens first. You never choose an amount. Everything else follows from that.

A HUNDRED AND TWO BENCHES, EVERY ONE SOLVED BY MACHINE Each level was solved by the game's own solver before it was allowed in. On ninety-nine of them the par beside it is the proven shortest solution; the other three are too large to search completely, so their par is the best solution found — and beating it is possible. Solve a bench for a blue wax seal; solve it in par for a red one. There is no third tier and no partial credit.

ONE HINT PER BENCH, IF YOU WANT IT It works from wherever you are rather than from the start, lights up the next move on the board, and if the bench can no longer be finished, it says so.

A MARKET ORDER EVERY DAY One extra bench daily, the same one for everybody, drawn fresh and machine-checked before you ever see it. No streak, nothing lost by missing a day, and it stays free forever.

A FORMULARY THAT FILLS IN AS YOU WORK Each pigment you manage to make earns a page: what it was ground from, who was poisoned by it, and what it cost. Orpiment is arsenic and the merchants sold it as fly poison. Tyrian purple took ten thousand sea snails per gram and the works had to sit downwind of the city by law. Minium gave English the word "miniature".

NO ENERGY. NO LIVES. NO TIMERS. NO ADVERTISING. Undo is free and unlimited, reset is one tap, and nothing about experimenting costs you anything — the whole pleasure of the game is trying a pour to see what colour comes out.

Free through the first five acts and the daily market order. One payment unlocks the remaining eighty-two benches: the docket that holds orders back, the buffers, the acts solved by distilling a colour apart, the benches with no drain at all, and the master's commission at the end.