Overview

In Betta, players are tasked with arranging displays of bettas in Betty’s pet shop, scoring points for making certain patterns, and for the amount of their own coloured bettas there are in the final displays.

The main description below is for 2–4 players. For solo mode, see the section at the end.

Set-up

Each player starts with a hand of 3 cards, and a stack of 6 face-down cards. Each card shows two bettas of the player’s colour, and one of another colour.

Across the middle of the screen are a number of displays (5, 6 or 8, depending on the number of players). Some of these displays will already have three bettas in them: for each player there is a display with a card of that player’s type in it.

At the top of the screen are shown the target patterns (which vary from game to game). (There are reports that sometimes these patterns are not displayed. If this happens, try hitting F5 to do a browser refresh.)

Gameplay

On each of their turns, a player chooses a card from their hand, optionally rotates it by a multiple of 90°, and places it on a display of their choice, except that it is not allowed to play on a display that already has 9 visible bettas.

If placing the card produces one of the target patterns, in bettas of a single colour, then the player scores 3, 5 or 7 points, as indicated above the pattern in question. If the move makes more than one pattern, only the one that would score the most counts.

In order to be considered to match a target pattern:

• The pattern needs to be formed by bettas of a single colour, but this does not have to be the player’s own colour.

• It does not matter if there are extra bettas of the same colour that are not part of the pattern.

• The pattern does not need to be in the orientation shown at the top of the screen — any rotation of that pattern counts.

• It does not matter if the pattern was already present before the player played the new card, as long as at least one of bettas in the pattern comes from that card.

Playing a card into an empty display cannot produce one of the target patterns, but scores 2 points anyway.

Having played a card, the player receives another card from their stack, if the stack is not empty.

Game end

The game ends when either of the following occurs:

• All displays have 9 visible bettas.

• All players have taken 7 turns (and therefore have only two cards remaining in hand).

Final scoring

At the end of the game each player scores points for the number of bettas of their colour visible in the displays, according to the table shown below their hand: 0 points for less than 2 bettas, 1 point for 2 bettas, 3 points for 3 bettas, 6 points for 4 bettas, 10 points for 5 bettas, and 15 points for 6 or more bettas. These points are scored for each display individually, and are added to the previously scored points to produce the player’s final score.

The winner is the player with the highest score. If two or more players are tied on the highest score, then victory goes to the player with the most visible bettas of their colour, or if that fails to break the tie, then to the player with the most visible bettas of their colour in a single display; if that too fails to break the tie, then the game is a tie.

Solo mode

In solo mode there are a few differences:

• There are only 3 displays.

• In addition to your hand of 3 cards, you have a stack of 11 face-down cards (rather than just 6), and you will play all 14 of these cards (unless you fill all three displays first).

• You do not play as a particular colour: the cards you play with will not all have the same majority colour, and at the end of the game your score for each display is based on whichever colour is most abundant in that display.

• Final scoring awards higher scores for 7 or 8 bettas of a single colour in a display: 21 or 28 points, respectively.