How to play Dippy

Drawing

• Drag your finger or mouse to draw. Ink sets solid exactly where you draw it and never falls.
• You cannot draw through shelves, the egg, the cup or other objects, or on a tea towel. The line stops where it is blocked.
• Every level has an ink pot. The meter at the top shows what is left, with gold marks where each star stops.
• Undo removes your last line; the bin clears them all. On a keyboard, Z undoes and Enter lets go.

Gently does it

• A long drop or a hard knock cracks an egg. Roughly, a fall of more than three egg-heights onto something hard is too much.
• Slopes turn a fall into a roll. A gentle slope into the cup is safer than a steep one.
• A knitted tea cosy is a soft landing that never cracks. A jelly is soft too, but bouncy.
• Butter is slippery: things slide fast. Jam is sticky: it slows things right down.

Brass pins

A line you start on a brass drawing pin does not set solid. It swings on the pin like an arm, so it can nudge Dippy off a ledge, knock a toast soldier over or act as a gate. Start drawing near a pin and the line snaps onto it and turns red.

Stars and the levels

Get Dippy home for one star; use less ink for two or three. There are sixty levels in five chapters: Soft Boiled, Butter Fingers, Pinned Down, Wobbly Bits and Full English. If you get stuck, a hint shows one way through after a few tries.

The daily breakfast and scoring

• One table for everyone each day, new at midnight UK time. You get three pours.
• Your best successful pour counts: up to 1,000 points for the share of the ink pot you did not use, plus 150 if it worked on the first pour or 75 on the second, plus 10 for getting home.
• After a successful pour you can bank it, or pour again to try to use less ink. A worse pour never lowers your score.
• The server replays every pour with the same physics, so the leaderboard only shows what really happened.

Tips

• Watch where Dippy goes with no ink first: your first pour is a free look if you draw a tiny line somewhere harmless. It still uses a pour, though!
• Short lines in the right place beat long ones. Often a single small bump or ramp is all it takes.
• Aim for Dippy to drop into the cup from just above the rim, not to roll in from the side: the cup's wall stops a rolling egg.