In the beginning on the first level you have two minutes to create poker hands. The countdown timer is located on the top left side of the game.
Poker hands can be created by two separate selection method:
"Swipe gesture mode": by pressing your finger on a card and dragging up, down, left or right (and depending on the mode and/or difficulty mode even laterally). You should not release your finger in this mode but until you want to finsh the selection, you should continuously keep moving your finger and selecting more cards.
As you drag your finger the selected cards will dim yellow indicating that they have been selected. Releasing your finger causes the game to evaluate the hand. In certain difficulty modes and game levels a visual aid will highlight (with an orange dim) those neighboring cards which can be selected additionally.
"Clicking one-by-one": individually pressing your finger and releasing over the desired cards. The game intelligently recognizes that mode if you first select a lonely card. If visual aid to highlight selectable neighbors, you can follow the orange dim to broaden the selection by clicking on orange cards, one-by-one. (If there's no visual aid, you just have to follow the rules to select proper neighbors. If you select a non neighboring card, a new selection begins with that card being the only selected.)
You should press the "Eval" button to indicate the end of selection and that will also trigger the evaluation of the currently selected hand. In this mode the game cannot guess when your selection is done (as opposed to the swipe gesture mode). If you click on an already selected card it becomes unselected. This can be useful when you change your mind and you are exploring different poker possibilities.
This is a visual aid which helps to indicate the rules of the game and can tremendously help the human eye to consider possible selections. The selected hand is dimmed yellow, while the potential selectable neighbors are dimmed orange.
This aid is turned on for educational purposes on the first level of each difficulty mode. For further availability see "Difficulty Modes".
Being able to select diagonal neighbors can greatly increase the hand possibilities in case of square board layout. With hexagonal layout this question doesn't apply, because the diagonal neighbors are inherently side neighbors too.
As for square layout easy mode, diagonal selection is allowed in all game levels, and in medium mode it is available for a while. For further details see "Difficulty Modes".
If no valid selection was made, the cards will remain. If a valid hand is made the cards are discarded and points are given. The remaining cards fall down to fill the empty positions.
Valid hands include all normal poker hands added with three and four card versions of a flush or straight. The two dimensional geometrical layout and the three and four card variations changes the winning odds compared to poker hand rankings.
Straight examples (special wheel straights):
Poker hands are assigned points based on the complexity of the hand (pair, three of a kind, etc.) in addition to an assigned value of the individual cards. Accumulated points are listed on the top right side of the game. The blue information section provides information about the current selection, including the calculated value.
| Hand | Base Value | Time Bonus (seconds) |
|---|---|---|
| Pair | 1 | 0 |
| Three Card Flush | 15 | 0 |
| Three Card Straight | 30 | 0 |
| Three Card Straight Flush | 50 | 0 |
| Three of a Kind | 100 | 0 |
| Four Card Straight | 125 | 0 |
| Pairs | 150 | 0 |
| Four Card Flush | 170 | 0 |
| Straight | 200 | 0 |
| Four Card Straight Flush | 250 | 0 |
| Flush | 300 | 0 |
| Full House | 350 | 0 |
| Four of a Kind | 2000 | 0 |
| Straight Flush | 5000 | 30 |
| Five of a Kind | 8000 | 30 |
Occasionally you may run out of valid poker hands to select. A spin button is used to spin each column of cards similar to a slot machine. There is a 200 point penalty each time the spin button is used.
Joker cards come in two colors. Both jokers can transform into any value to complete a hand. Hoerver the red joker can only transform into Hearts or Diamonds while the black joker can only act as Spades or Clubs. When a joker is part of selection the best possible (highest score) hand which the joker can complete will be considered, and the double of that hand's score will be rewarded.