~ CATCH THEM WHILE THEY ARE LIT ~
Read that card from the top down and you have the whole game: the more one is worth, the less of the time you can see it, and the fussier it is about how bright your jar has got.
Press START. Move the jar over the garden, then let go to shut the lid — a mouse release or a finger lift is what does the catching, not the press. On a computer the jar already follows your mouse around, so a normal click is just a very quick press-and-let-go. On a phone, drag the jar into place first, then lift your finger off the screen. Or use the arrow keys and the space bar.
You can only catch a firefly while its light is ON. A dark one is almost invisible, so snapping the lid is a guess about when it will blink back on.
Snap on nothing and the garden goes dark around you. Every firefly near the jar is startled, puts its light out and scatters for a few seconds. You do not lose any points — you lose the thing you were looking at. The green ones come back first. The blue ones sulk.
Your jar is bait. Every firefly you catch makes it glow brighter, and a brighter jar pulls more of them towards you — but only the cheap green ones. Look at the "comes to" column: once your jar is nine tenths full the gold ones will not come near it, and a blue one wants a jar that is nearly empty. Fill it right up and you can watch a circle of empty garden open around you.
So hold still. Stop moving for a moment and a slow ring opens out of the jar, and anything inside it drifts towards you. Nothing is ever frightened of the ring, because it is not a light — it is you sitting there doing nothing. It is the only way to get a blue one when your jar is blazing.
LET ONE GO — the button in the bottom-left corner, or the R key. One drifts out of the jar and hangs there glowing, and the others come to look at it. Your points do not go down. You are spending brightness, not score.
The moth turns up from NORMAL onwards. It is drawn to a bright jar. It flies in, circles the lid for a couple of seconds so you always see it coming, then bumps the jar open and one of yours gets away. Your points stay. Two ways out, and you can already do both: let one go and the moth follows that light instead, or let your jar go dim and it loses interest.
There is no clock. The moon crossing the sky is the clock. When the bottom of the sky starts going orange, the night is nearly over.
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