# Take a break

> A shelf of small games for a five-minute break: a week to fill, a table to seat, a paper plane, a board of tangled threads, and the classics, volleyball included. Play calm or competitive, and each keeps your best score.

The gamepad icon in the header opens the break room. It always opens on the
shelf of games, and a ribbon marks the one you played last, so one press takes
you back into it in the way you last played. **All games** takes you back to
the shelf.

Every game takes about five minutes and one thumb or one mouse, and each one
has a number to beat. You pick how you want to play: every game has a calm way,
with no way to fail and no clock, and a competitive way, with a clock, a few
misses to spend or a tower that ends on the first slip. Nothing competitive is
forced on you, and a game remembers the way you last played it.

## What every game has

- **A Tutorial row** on the start menu that never goes away. It plays the
  lesson from the start whenever you ask, and a tutorial round keeps no score,
  so replaying it cannot earn anything twice. **How to play** has the same
  button, with pictures from the game itself and the controls for touch, mouse
  and keyboard.
- **Restart** in the bar at the top during a level. It asks for a second press
  so a stray tap never throws a round away.
- **Play it again** beside **Next** when a level ends, if you want another go
  at the same one.
- **A place and a time of day.** Each game has a few places to play in, and
  the sky can follow your clock or stay at dawn, day, dusk or night. You set
  both from the start menu, and they follow you to your other devices.
- **Welcome back.** Leave in the middle of a round and the game keeps it. Next
  time you open it, a card asks whether to carry on.
- **A place that notices you.** The room answers what you do. A ball or a
  card that lands kicks up whatever the season has on the ground: snow,
  leaves, petals, dust, or a splash when it is raining. A big hit or a win
  sends the birds up, and you hear their wings. A combo turns the lamps up for a moment. Something fast
  pushes the falling snow aside, and when the wind gets up, the trees, the
  hanging lamps and the weather all move with it. Rain darkens the ground the
  longer it falls. The characters feel the weather too: they squint in summer
  sun, shiver in the snow, hunch in the rain and yawn late at night. With
  reduced motion turned on, the room keeps still.

## The Week

A planner grid and a tray of tasks. Drag a task into the week; fill a whole
day, or the same hour across every day, and it clears. The week fills up the
way real ones do, and the score is how much you fit. Tap a task (or twist two
fingers) to turn it, and drop one on **Hold** to keep it for later.

It plays all seven days, with a lighter weekend. **Workweek (Mon to Fri)** is
there if you would rather keep to the office week.

## Table for Six

A family dinner and a list of wishes: who wants to sit by whom, who needs the
end of the table. Each wish sits beside the guest who made it, and the places
it names light up. Pick a guest up and put them in a seat, or tap a guest and
then a seat, until every wish holds. Fewer moves is better.

Each table allows a few undos, and an undone move still counts. A hint explains
the reasoning rather than just making the move. The dinners get harder a step
at a time, with one new kind of wish at once and an easier table now and then.

The room is laid out for the screen you play on. On a phone, each wish sits
in a small bubble by the guest, and a tap on a guest shows the whole card. If
you turn the phone on its side, Undo and Hint move into the corner so the
table keeps the full height. On a tablet or a laptop the cards sit beside the
guests. On a large monitor the wishes, the hints and what the guests say get
bigger with the screen, so you can read them from your chair. The same layout
can look different from one dinner to the next: the room may be turned around
and the tablecloth changes, but every left and right still means what it
says.

## Paper Plane

Press and hold to throw, and keep holding to lift the nose. Let go to glide.
To put the nose down, slide the held finger (or the held mouse) down, and slide
it back up to lift again; on a keyboard it is Down or S. The plane rides the warm air rising where the pages turn. Land on the red
line, and the distance is the number to beat.

## Loose Ends

A cork board of pins and threads. Drag the pins until no two threads cross.
Each board is a little bigger than the last.

## The classics

### Stack

A crane, a pile of cards and your character at the foot of it.
The crane swings a card over the pile and one press drops it straight down. If
it hangs over the edge, the overhang is trimmed off and the next card is only as
wide as what is left. Land it right on top and it stays whole, and a few
perfect drops in a row grow a narrowed card back. The ruler down the side marks
your best height.

**Five ways to play Stack**

- **Zen**: a miss only costs the card.
- **Blueprint**: match a drawing by dropping off-center on purpose.
- **Tower**: ends on the first miss.
- **Tall order**: a height to reach before your third miss.
- **Against the clock**: ninety seconds, with a second back for every perfect drop.

Index cards come first, then sticky notes and books as your towers grow. The
first time you play, the game shows you how as you go.

### Catch the Tasks

The room that was here first, rebuilt. Tasks fall from
the top of the page and you catch them in a board column: plain tasks, priority
ones worth more, sticky notes that flutter, meetings that drop fast, and the
odd notification ping you are better off letting fall.

**Three powers that turn up now and then**

- **Focus**: slows everything down.
- **Inbox zero**: drops every task on the page into your column.
- **Delegate**: brings a second column to help.

Calm ways to play include **A day** (sixty tasks, catch what you can),
**Rain**, **Sort** and **Two baskets**; **Against the clock** and **Three
misses** are the competitive ones. It follows your theme, like every other
game. Steer with the arrow keys on a keyboard or a drag on a phone.

> **On the phone:** On the phone app you can also tilt to steer. See [Extras on the phone](#extras-on-the-phone).

### Volley

Two of the cast on a court with a net, playing real volleyball. The ball is in play until it touches the floor. If it lands in a
court, the other side scores; if it lands out, or hits a wall, the ceiling or
anything off the court, the side that touched it last loses the point. Each side
gets up to three touches, so you can pass it to yourself, set it and hit it
over, and you can run off your own court to save a ball that is still in the
air.

The shot the game thinks is right is written over your character: a bump, a
set, a spike by the net, a block at their hit. One press plays it. Add a
direction to pick another shot.

| Playing on | Run                               | Play the ball                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
| ---------- | --------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Touch      | Drag anywhere                     | Tap for the written shot. Flick up to set it high (a lob on your last touch), toward the net to attack, down to tip it over or dig, back to keep it. Tap to serve. Hold a little to float it short, longer to drive it deep. Steering with one thumb, tap with the other |
| Keyboard   | Left and Right, or `A` and `D`    | `Space` for the written shot. Hold Up, Down or a direction as you press for the others; `X` attacks. Hold `Space` to serve: a little floats it short, longer drives it deep                                                                                              |
| Mouse      | The character follows the pointer | Click for the written shot. Point high above your character to set it high, at the floor to tip or dig, and Shift and click to attack. Hold the click to serve: a little floats it, longer drives it                                                                     |

Every touch is graded Perfect, Early or Late, so you can see your timing
improve. On a phone held upright, the court is framed for portrait, and the
camera eases across the court as the ball crosses rather than cutting.

**Serving.** A tap is the safe serve, high to the middle of their court. Hold
it and a meter fills over your character, naming the serve you would get if
you let go now: a **float serve** that drops short, a **serve** to the middle,
then a **drive serve**, flat, fast and deep.

**Blocking.** When their spiker goes up at the net and you are close to it,
the line over the court says their spike is coming. Press then and your
character steps to the tape and jumps with their hit, hands up. A press after
the ball is already struck is usually too late, as it is in real volleyball.

**Help on the way.** You always do the steering, but when you take your
character close to a ball it could reach, it steps in under it instead of
letting it drop behind. Easy helps from furthest away and Hard not at all.
When a match ends, both players stop where they are and the result is marked
on your character.

**Three levels**

- **Easy**: your character runs to the ball, steps in under one you steer close to, and keeps up one you miss, against a relaxed opponent. A beginner can win here.
- **Normal**: you do the running and every touch is yours, with a small step in under a ball you steer close to.
- **Hard**: you have to be closer to the ball, and the opponent reads you.

Every character has the same body and plays as well as the others; they differ
in how they like to play and in what they say.

**Ways to play Volley**

- **Lesson**: (calm): five short steps, serve, pass and spike with one press, then a high set and a tip. `N` skips a step.
- **Rally**: (calm): you and a partner keep it going together.
- **Spike practice**: (calm): fifteen easy feeds to put on chalk circles.
- **Match**: the quick game, one set to 11, won by two, with a count of your wins in a row.
- **Official**: beach volleyball as it is refereed. Best of three sets to 21, 21 and 15, each won by two, and the players change ends every 7 points (every 5 in the third set), with the court turning around and each score staying over its player.
- **King of the court**: short games to 5 against the rest of the cast, one after another.
- **Two players**: both of you on one screen, left side against right, first to 9. On a keyboard the left player has `A`, `D`, `W`, `S` and `Space`, the right the arrows and `Enter`.
- **Today's court**: the same match for everyone today.

In Match and Official, the side that wins a rally serves the next, a block
counts as one of your three touches, and a serve that clips the net and carries
over is in play. Double contact on a set is too fine to judge in the game, so
it is never called. King of the court, Two players and Today's court keep their
first-to-9 (or 5) games with the rally winner serving and a block as a free
touch. Each way of playing shows its rules in one line on the card where you
pick it.

There are five courts: the paper court, a school gym, a beach, a rooftop and a
park.

## How the characters play

The characters in the games think for themselves. Each one has a personality
drawn from its own temperament, so one likes to attack and another plays it
safe, and each makes the kind of small mistakes a person makes rather than
playing perfectly.

They also learn how you play: where you like to hit, whether a deep ball or a
short one gives you trouble, which days of The Week you fill first. What they
learn is a few dozen numbers per game, kept with your games settings on your
account, so the characters on your phone know what the ones on your laptop
picked up. Older habits fade, so last week counts for more than three months
ago.

Within the level you pick, a game keeps the contest close. If you are winning
every point it leans a little harder, and if you are losing every point it
eases off. It only moves inside a narrow band around your level: Easy stays
easy and Hard stays hard. Modes that promise a fair fight, where a best score
is at stake, play exactly at the level you chose.

When you are online, a character's lines and its plan for a match can come
from Margin Intelligence. Those answers are shared and reused for everyone,
never built from anything you typed, and they do not count against your AI
actions. Offline, or if that is slow, the characters think on the device and
the game plays the same.

## Extras on the phone

The phone app adds a few things on top of the touch controls, never in place
of them. Each one has its own switch in the game's settings sheet, and every
game plays fully by touch with all of them off.

- **Tilt** steers by tilting the phone.
- **Shake** does the game's shake, where it has one.
- **Paper that moves** shifts the page a little as you tilt the phone.
- **Haptics** gives a small tap in your hand on every snap and landing.
- **Two fingers** lets you twist or pinch.

With Reduce Motion on, the motion extras stay still. When a round ends,
**Share** on the result card sends the result as a picture.

## Your best, everywhere

Every game keeps your best scores and stars on your account, so a best you set
on your phone is the one to beat on your laptop. Each way of playing has a best
of its own. Two devices never lower each other's score: the higher one always
wins. No game has a leaderboard, and nobody else can see your scores.

## Sound

The games have their own sounds, and they follow your sound setting in
**Settings → Notifications**. If sounds are off for your account, the games
are quiet too. Each game also has its own sound switch, which mutes only the
device you are on. A game's sounds download the first time you play it, and
after that it plays with sound offline. Most sounds have several takes that
take turns, so a hit you hear forty times a round rarely sounds the same twice.

### Music

Each game has its own music, written for it: two to four longer pieces that
change with where you play and the time of day. Volley's rooftop gets a
relaxed groove under string lights, the café in The Week gets evening jazz,
and Loose Ends turns quieter after dark. When a piece has played through, the
next one in the set takes over, so you rarely hear the same one twice in a
row. A shared library of other pieces comes around now and then too, for
variety.

Between rounds, on the start card, the level picker and the result, a short
piece of the game's own plays instead, and the longer music comes back when
the round starts. The music sits under the room and the game's own sounds, and
it drops back and softens while a menu is open.

The music also follows the match. As a rally gets longer, a clock runs down,
a stack gets taller or a flight goes on, the piece opens up and gets a little
brighter and a little louder. It never cuts to another piece in the middle of
a round. When a round ends, the music rises into the moment and then settles
back down. On the phone the music gets a little louder but its tone stays the
same.

The shelf, where you pick a game, has quiet music of its own. It only starts
after you tap or press something there. It changes with the time of day.
When you open a game it keeps playing, softly, under the game's menu, and
fades out once the game's own music has started, so there is no silent gap
between them. The
**Music** switch next to **Skip openings** turns it off. In the browser it is
the same switch as the one in each game, so turning it off on the shelf turns
game music off on that device too. On the phone each game keeps its own music
switch, and the shelf has its own as well.

To choose, open the pause menu (or the game's place settings) and pick under
**Music**:

- **Adaptive** follows the place, the hour and the season. This is the
  default.
- **A named piece** plays that one for as long as you play, menus included.
  Every piece in every game is on the list, not only the game's own.
- **Off** plays no music in this game. The other games keep theirs.

Your pick is saved for each game on your account, so your phone and your
laptop play the same thing. On the phone the same choice is in the game's
settings sheet, under Sound. A piece downloads the first time it plays. The
music switch beside the sound switch still turns music off in every game on
the device you are on.

## Five minutes

A break is five minutes, and that is not a setting. The room counts down and
tells you where you came from, so the way out is the way back to the thing you
were doing rather than a decision you have to make again.

## Why a productivity app ships games

Because breaks are part of work, and a break that stays inside the app is one
you actually come back from. Five minutes with a small puzzle resets your head
better than five minutes of a feed designed to keep you.

Nothing is wired to them. No reward, no daily streak to protect, no notifications,
and no effect on your data at all.

## Where it lives

The gamepad icon in the top bar, on every surface, or **Take a break** from the
command palette. In the phone app, **Take a break** is in the Margin
Intelligence sheet and on the Focus screen. In a phone browser the games play in portrait with touch controls,
fit the screen without scrolling, and a drag in a game never scrolls or
refreshes the page. On a large monitor every game grows with the screen: the
board, the characters, the room around them and every word get bigger
together, so a 1440p or 4K screen is filled the way a laptop's is and
everything reads from your chair. Every game also works with a keyboard.

**Where to next**

- [Focus and Journal](https://themarginapp.com/docs/focus-and-journal): the timer that tells you when a break is due
- [Themes and appearance](https://themarginapp.com/docs/themes-and-appearance): the theme every game follows
- [Working offline](https://themarginapp.com/docs/working-offline): what else keeps working with no signal


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Section: The rest of life. Checked against the running product on October 7, 2026.
Web page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/take-a-break. Every docs page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/llms.txt