How to play Capstone
Capstone is a daily number pyramid. Every brick is the sum of the two directly beneath it, some bricks are already filled in, and you type numbers into the rest until the whole thing adds up. Six rows on the gentler days and seven at the weekend, with negative numbers throughout — and the blanks sit low on purpose, so finishing one means reasoning downwards from a total as often as upwards from a pair. It is the two-minute daily: a dozen or so additions and subtractions, and no submit button, because the pyramid finishes itself the moment every brick is right.
Make your own Capstone pyramid and share it with a link.
How to play
- Read the rule off the shape: any brick is the two beneath it added together.
- Add upwards where you can. Two filled bricks side by side give you the one above them for free.
- Subtract downwards where you cannot. A brick and one of its two children give you the other child — that is the move the puzzle is built around.
- Type into any empty brick. Negative numbers are allowed and often necessary.
- Press Check if you want to know whether anything is wrong. It gives you a count, never a position.
- The round ends by itself when every brick adds up. Show answers fills the rest in but ends the day unsolved.
Tips & strategy
- Start where a brick has two filled neighbours beneath it, or a filled parent and one filled child. Those are free, and each one you take opens another.
- Work along a row rather than jumping about. Once you have one brick in a row, its parent usually hands you the next one along.
- When you stall, look at the row above rather than the row below. A total you already have is a subtraction waiting to happen.
- With negatives, sanity-check the direction: if the brick above is smaller than the brick below it, the missing neighbour is negative.
- The base row is where the puzzle is won. Everything above it is determined the moment the base is complete, so a base brick is worth more than any other.
- If two of your bricks disagree, trust the givens and re-derive rather than nudging a number until it fits.
Accessibility
Capstone has no colour channel at all — a given brick and one you have filled differ by their border and by what they say, never by hue. Every brick tells a screen reader its row, its position, its value, and which two bricks sit beneath it, so the structure is stated outright rather than inferred from the picture, and it updates as you fill bricks in. Each row is announced as a list, the boxes are ordinary number fields that take a keyboard anywhere and a numeric keypad on a phone, and every target is at least 44 pixels tall.