Now there is a floor. It is cut stone, dark grey slabs with pale joints between them, and every slab is a different shape because the pattern is worked out from where you are standing rather than stamped from a tile. Walk in any direction and it never repeats. This is a lot of effort for something you will look at for four seconds before a block hits you in the shin, and we are fine with that.

Around it there is a hall. White walls, fifteen metres of them, with the corners rounded off so the light runs around them instead of stopping dead. Fifteen metres is roughly a five storey building, which sounds generous until you remember what four people do to a tower.

The part that changes the game is that the walls are solid. A block you kick across the room now hits something and comes back. Previously it left, and it kept leaving, and nobody ever saw it again. The room is not on your side. It just gives your mistakes somewhere to land.

So now it wobbles. Each block sits up to two millimetres off its slot, each whole row drifts up to four millimetres against the one below, and every block is turned up to six tenths of a degree. Those are small numbers. You will not spot any single one of them.

What you spot is the tower. Rows lean very slightly against each other, edges almost line up instead of exactly lining up, and the whole thing reads as something four people put together in a hurry rather than something that was printed.

There is a practical side to this. A perfect tower distributes weight perfectly, and a perfect tower is boring to pull a block out of, because everything above it comes straight down in one piece. A tower with a lean already has an opinion about which way it wants to go. Your job is to disagree with it for as long as possible.

The clearance is the good part. The tower is sixty centimetres across and the plinth is seventy, so there are five centimetres of ledge on each side. That is enough to see the thing your tower is standing on and nowhere near enough to be useful. A block that lands half on the edge gets a moment to think about it.

The other way to play gets its own. That mode starts you with nothing at all, just a green platform three metres across, knee height, lit along the top. Every block on it arrived because somebody carried it there. Three sizes wait on a counter behind you, up to a six metre stone that one person can carry and two people can carry into each other.

Both plinths are proper objects now instead of the glowing pink boxes that stood in for them. The pink boxes did the job. Nobody misses them.

The landing puts you in a stagger, and the stagger is the part that changed for everyone else. It used to be a private experience: you got shoved, your controls went vague, and to the other three players you carried on walking like a person with excellent posture. Now the character visibly tips and wobbles for as long as it lasts, and your own view nods along by 3 degrees, so being knocked about looks from the outside exactly as undignified as it feels from the inside.

While we were in there, a jump you press just slightly too early is remembered for a moment and fires the instant you touch the ground. You were going to blame the game for that one anyway. Now you cannot, and the tower is still the tower, and gravity has not agreed to any of this.

What went away is the helpful part. There used to be a ghost outline showing where your block would land, and a gentle snap that lined it up with the row below, and a small hop as the block teleported into position. All of that was lovely and none of it was the game. Placing a block was a parking manoeuvre with assistance. Now it is a person leaning over a stack of other people’s decisions holding four kilograms at arm’s length, hoping.

A block only joins the tower once it has stopped moving on its own. Until then it is just a thing lying up there, and if the row underneath disagrees with your angle, it will say so.

The other thing we removed is the cleanup crew. When the tower comes down, it stays down. Nothing quietly rebuilds it while you are still standing in the rubble deciding whose fault it was. Somebody has to press the key, and pressing that key is an admission.

The fist closes early, well before the arm has reached carrying height. That was not the plan, it was a number that looked better than the honest one. You commit visibly a moment before you are actually holding anything, which is exactly how it feels to reach for a block you are not sure about.

In first person your hands now sit three quarters of the way up already, angled out in front of you, so you can always see them. Grabbing only plays the last quarter. They pass through everything, deliberately. We tried giving them collision twice. Resting in front of your chest, the hands blocked every approach to the tower and you could not walk up to your own building site. Holding something high, they ended up buried inside the rows below. Ghost hands it is.

The nose is also gone. Your character had one, briefly, so other people could tell which way you were facing. The shoulders do that better, so the face went back to being the smooth end of a capsule. Nobody has asked about the nose.

Every board is now drawn from a small pile of warped shapes. One is bowed, one is twisted, one is flat enough to lull you. You find out which one you are carrying when you set it down and a corner refuses to touch anything.

Each game deals its own boards. The stack that held last round is not a plan any more, it is a fond memory.

A block lands where you were holding it, at the angle you were holding it. A row of four can be four different amounts of nearly straight, and the tower keeps all four. Stacking neatly is the game, not a service the game performs for you.

Towers do not fall more often than before. They fall for reasons you can point at, which is worse.

You can pick it up, carry it, set it down where you want it and stand on it. From up there the top row is suddenly within reach, which is either good planning or the second to last decision of the round. The chair is furniture and never counts as part of the tower, so nothing you do with it is technically building.

The tower has no opinion on any of this. It comes down on its own schedule.

You can switch while carrying something. Turn flying off in mid air with a block in your arms and you both arrive at the same time, and nobody stops you. Everyone at the tower can be on different rules at once, so one player is placing a block with great care while another descends onto it like weather.

The slabs are hollow, so they weigh about as much as three of you and handle like a mattress in a stairwell. Standing next to a stack of them you stop planning and start negotiating. Let go, and the whole thing sways for a while as if it is thinking it over.

Same game, same four people, same bad idea. It is just much further above your head.