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Your first descent

The Arena is one disc, one life and floors that keep going down. This guide takes you from making your disc to beating the first boss on floor 8.

Step 1: make your disc

Press ARENA on the main menu. The first time, you are asked to make a disc: pick a colour, give it a name and press START TRAINING. The name appears on the Arena leaderboard if you post a deep floor, so it has to be a real name of three to twelve characters (an empty name becomes RECRUIT).

Your disc lives in this browser. Before you invest much in it, press SAVE in the den and keep the code you are given. It is the only way to bring the disc back if your browser's data is cleared, which iPhone Safari does by itself after about a week away.

Step 2: spend your first coins

Every run of ordinary quick play pays coins to your disc, so if you have been playing evader or chaser rounds you probably have some already. In the den you can spend them two ways:

• Stat points. Your disc has four stats (SPEED, STAMINA, AGILITY and NERVE) sharing one pool called POWER. A new disc is a ROOKIE with 60 MAX POWER and a cap of 35 on any one stat.
• Skills. The six moves quick play hands out by round can be bought here and kept for good: VAULT for 260 coins up to DECOY for 540.

For the first eight floors, a disc leaning on AGILITY and STAMINA works well: longer dashes that come back sooner. The training guide goes deeper into builds.

Step 3: go down

Press ENTER in the den. Each floor is a round: survive the clock and the floor is cleared. There are no hearts down here. One tag ends the descent, and no orb or boost gives you a life back.

Clear a floor and you are dealt three boosts. Pick one; it lasts the next floor only. Look at what the next floor is before you pick. On ordinary floors STOPWATCH (three seconds shorter) and LONG LEGS are safe choices, and PAYDAY is a good one when the floor looks easy.

The chasers on the first floors are the same four personalities as quick play. They get faster and sharper with every floor, and so does the pay.

Step 4: know when to walk away

Here is the part new players miss: stopping is always allowed. Leave a descent between floors and it is kept, so you can come back later and carry on from that floor. Get tagged and the descent is gone (back to the top, or to your last checkpoint).

So if you have had a close call and you are holding coins from a good run, walking away to spend them and coming back stronger is often the smart move. Every coin you earned is already yours either way.

Step 5: floors 6 and 7, meet the junior

The two floors before each boss are patrolled by its junior. Before THE GALE that is the YOUNG GALE: same habits, less of everything. Treat these floors as practice. Notice that it is faster than the other chasers, and that its lunge is short and slow to come back.

Step 6: THE GALE, floor 8

A boss floor works differently from every other floor:

• The clock is not your friend. You win by reaching all five markers before the clock (40 seconds) runs out. Letting it run out is a loss.
• No orbs spawn, and one tag still ends it.
• It changes halfway. At the midpoint the boss announces its rage: IT STOPS CIRCLING.

THE GALE is faster than you, always, even with maxed SPEED. You will never outrun it in a straight line, so don't try. Its weakness is a short lunge on a long cooldown: dash late and turn, so it commits and misses, then use the time it needs to recover to reach the next marker. That is why the boss card says this fight is answered by AGILITY. Before the fight, pick MAGNET if it is offered (it lets you claim markers from further off), or HEAVY LEGS. Never STOPWATCH: a shorter clock only hurts on a boss floor.

The layout is offset combs with no straight lanes, and the blocks shift, so plan each marker as you go rather than all at once.

What you get for beating it

• A checkpoint. From now on a tag sends you back to floor 9, not floor 1.
• MATADOR, the first drop: a lunge that misses you closely overshoots, and into a wall the chaser is stunned.
• A 400-coin purse and +20 MAX POWER, permanently. Depth is the only thing that makes your disc bigger, and every floor past floor 5 adds 8 more.

Next up is THE ANVIL on floor 16. The boss guide covers all four fights.