Kugelblitz: Cosmic Merge

Gravity pulls to the middle. Everything you drop falls inward and piles up. Kugelblitz is a merge game played in a circle instead of a box. There is no floor — a well at the centre of the arena draws every body toward it, so your pile grows outward in every direction at once, and the only thing holding it back is the event horizon ring at the edge. Two bodies of the same kind that touch become the next one up. Dust becomes a pebble. Pebbles become an asteroid, then a comet, a moon, a rocky planet, a gas giant, a brown dwarf, a star. Ten rungs, each one heavier than the last — and heavy things sink. A neutron star dropped onto a bed of dust will burrow its way to dead centre while the dust rides up over it, because mass behaves like mass here. Get two neutron stars to touch and you make a kugelblitz: a black hole born of pure energy. It opens at the point of collapse, drags the entire…