How to play Retusch

The idea in three sentences

You are given a painting with one square erased, and you repaint it so it goes unnoticed.

Then everyone looks at the retouched paintings and hunts for the repainted squares.

You score by finding fast, and you also score for as long as your own hiding place holds.

How a round unfolds

A game strings together identical rounds, five by default. Each one goes through three moments.

• Drawing. You receive your painting and your square, and you have 2 minutes by default to repaint it. The Done button counts as submitting: once everyone has submitted, the round moves on without waiting for the clock.
• The hunt. The painting reappears with the patches, and you have 30 seconds by default to spot them. Clicking a repainted square reveals it to the whole table.
• The reveal. Every hiding place is framed and named, including the ones nobody saw. A slider lets you compare the retouched painting with the original artwork.

The scoring

Two counters run at the same time, and they pull against each other: the hunter wants speed, the artist wants their square to hold.

• As a hunter: 1000 points if you find it within the first 3 seconds, then a steady decline down to 100 points at the very end of the phase. Missing or finding nothing earns you nothing.
• As an artist: only 100 points if your square falls immediately, then a steady climb up to 800 points if it holds to the end. A patch nobody finds is worth the maximum, 800 points.

The artist is paid once only, at the reveal, and on the fastest hunter. So it makes no difference whether two or eight people are looking for you: only the one who finds you first counts.

The scoring is the same whatever duration you set for the phase. Making the hunt longer does not move the two bounds, only the slope between them.

One mistake per round. The first click that touches no patch ends your hunt: without that rule, you would rake the image at random until you stumbled onto something. Two gestures cost nothing: clicking your own square, and clicking a patch that has already been found.

The drawing tools

• Brush (B): three quick sizes, plus a slider for the exact size. Shortcuts 1, 2 and 3 pick the three sizes.
• Paint bucket (P): fills a flat area in one go, never spilling outside your square.
• Eyedropper (I): picks a colour anywhere on the painting. Holding Alt switches to it for one click, then hands back to the previous tool.
• Hand (H): moves the view. Outside your square, the brush and the bucket do the same thing, so you almost never need to switch tools.
• Undo (Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z): steps back one stroke at a time, up to thirty times. There is no redo.
• The background swatch, at the end of the palette: it is the starting colour of your square. Painting with it amounts to erasing, except that it is a stroke like any other, which can be undone and painted over. That is why there is no eraser.

Five tips for hiding

• Pick colours, do not guess them. The eyedropper gives you the exact colour of the surroundings: a flat area that is even slightly off is spotted from far away, while an exact one becomes invisible.
• Continue whatever crosses your square. A wall, a horizon, a branch entering on one side has to come out on the other in the right place. A broken line is the first clue an experienced player looks for.
• Paint the corners first. This is the most common mistake: the middle is neat, the four corners stay at the original background, and the square shows up plainly without anyone even looking at the drawing.
• Work from broad to fine. Lay down the large masses of colour with a big brush first, then refine. The other way round eats all your time on one corner while the rest stays empty.
• Match the level of detail around you. A square that is too clean in the middle of a busy area shows up just as much as a sloppy one in the middle of a flat colour.

Four tips for hunting

• Look for lines that stop. A border, a cable, a table edge shifting by a hair: that is almost always where it is.
• Sweep first, zoom later. At full view, a badly blended square looks like a stain. Zoom is for confirming, not for searching.
• Be wary of the too smooth. A perfectly even surface in the middle of a texture is as suspicious as a smudge.
• Do not click at random. You only get one mistake: three seconds of checking cost less than the whole round.

What changes by mode?

Everything above describes the shared hunt, the default mode. The other modes change who draws, who searches and how you win: each one is detailed on the game modes page.