Four grammars cover the actions you can plan: hauling, mirrors, beams, and stones.
The rooms use four grammars. North hauls with push, pull, and teleport. East swaps a body or an object with a reflection. West routes colored beams through gems. South lands stones on water and rides the lily pads those landings release. The adventure is also sold with dozens of distinct game mechanics. The actions you can plan a room around are the ones already shown, because a verb that has never been demonstrated is not a plan.
Gold Rooms are where two grammars share a layout. The named combinations are Explorer beams with Trader mirrors, and the hauling crew with the Sailor’s stones. Learning the actions is therefore a pairing guide as much as a verb list. Learn the single-realm action until the landing, the beam color, or the crew chain is obvious. Then expect a merge room to ask for both.
| System | Used by | Effect | How it plays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hauling push | North party | Clear a lane by pushing | Shown as one example of a crew chain, not as the Warrior’s private move. |
| Hauling pull | North party | Draw an object into reach | Pairs with push and teleport when several bodies have to occupy the same plan. |
| Hauling teleport | North party | Cross a blockade | This verb is not bound to a single job title in the party of six. |
| Mirror swap | Trader | Swap with a reflection and throw it to another island | Standing farther from the glass makes the reflected landing farther away. |
| Colored beams | Explorer | Phase, smash, or teleport by mixing beam colors | The path opens when the right colors are powered together, not when a single gem is lit. |
| Skipping stones | Sailor | Land a stone and send lily pads along a new channel | A Gold Room can ask the hauling crew to share this water plan with the Sailor. |
A north room is crowded on purpose. Six roles can be present, and the interesting constraint is which body is free to push while another is pulling and a third has to blink past a wall. If you assign push to the Warrior just because the word sounds physical, you will misread the room. The examples are crew examples. The Bard’s crystal charm and the Druid’s accidental transmutation sit beside those examples. They are extra actions, and they do not replace the three hauling verbs.
The Cleric still has no unique action, and the Thief’s only distinctive detail is the beads on her bag. That absence matters when you are planning. A puzzle that seems to want a thief tool or a cleric blessing is asking for a crew chain instead. Teleport is the verb that skips a blocked tile. Pull is the verb that brings a weight toward the party. Push is the verb that opens a lane. Use all three before you look for a class ability the crew does not have.
Mirror play is a ruler. The Trader swaps with a reflection, then uses the glass to project that reflection toward another island in the archipelago. Close to the mirror, the landing is short. Farther back, the landing stretches. That single distance rule is why east rooms can be solved without a second item. If a reflected body falls short of a switch, step away and project again. Objects can be swapped as well as the Trader, so a crate is sometimes the piece that has to travel.
West is a color router. Beams from the Explorer’s gems phase through walls, smash boulders, and throw long teleports. One color is rarely the whole answer. A blocked path opens when the right beams are powered together. Treat a west room as a circuit: which gem feeds which wall, which color is allowed to break a rock, and which pair has to arrive at the same time. There is no ammunition count. The limit is the routing.
South is wet routing. The Sailor skips a stone onto the water, and lily pads ride the channels that the landing rearranges. A bad stone is not a miss in the combat sense. It is a channel that never opens, or a pad that leaves the island you needed. Erica Luttrell’s Sailor is marooned, so the fantasy of the path is planning a crossing rather than steering a ship in real time. The earlier game Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes is where this dialect comes from.
When a Gold Room joins south to north, the crew’s push, pull, and teleport have to serve the stone plan. Someone may need to be hauled onto a pad, or a stone landing may need a body teleported across the gap it creates. The other named merge joins west beams to east mirrors: a reflection can carry a beam problem onto another island, or a beam can change which glass is worth standing in front of. Those are the two combinations that have names. The remaining four dual areas are real and still untitled.
Yes. The adventure is sold with dozens of distinct game mechanics, not as a single-verb sokoban. The actions shown so far are the hauling trio, mirror swaps, colored beams, and skipping stones, plus the Bard’s crystals and the Druid’s transmutation. Gold Rooms combine those grammars. Count the actions you have seen, and treat any further verb as a move you will meet in a later room rather than one you can already plan.
Neither verb is locked to a job title. The north party pushes, pulls, and teleports as examples of combined play. The Warrior, Thief, Wizard, and Cleric do not receive private versions of those moves. The Bard and the Druid have additional actions, charm-and-crystals and accidental transmutation, and those extras still sit inside the same party. Build the chain first, then place the two special actions if the room contains crystals or a transmutation.