Wood block puzzle for iPhone
Three pieces at a time on a board nine cells across and twelve deep. Fill a row or a column and it clears. Nothing falls and nothing counts down unless you pick timed mode, so what decides how long a game lasts is where you put things.
iPhone · free · no ads, no account, works in airplane mode
The usual complaint about block puzzles is being handed three pieces that cannot be placed anywhere — losing to the deal rather than to a mistake. That does not happen here. Before a hand is given to you it is checked against the board you actually have, and redrawn if none of the three pieces fits. If twenty redraws somehow fail, the game hands you three single blocks instead. You can still lose, but only after the hand is on the table and you have used part of it.
A row clears when all nine of its cells are occupied; a column needs all twelve. That is the whole rule, and the difference between nine and twelve is real strategy — a row is the cheaper clear, so a full column is worth going after only when the board hands you one. The seven block colours — cream, lemon, caramel, strawberry, matcha, blueberry and chocolate on a dark graphite tray — are there so you can see the shape of what you placed, not so you can match them. Nothing in the game asks you to sort by colour, which means nothing in the game can punish you for not noticing one.
Clearing more than one line at once is worth much more than clearing them one at a time — the line score is squared in the number of lines. On top of that, a combo counter rises with every consecutive placement that clears something and multiplies the whole thing, then resets the moment you place a piece that clears nothing. Holding a combo alive is the skill the scoreboard actually rewards.
Clears and combos fill an energy bar. At full it can be spent, once, to wipe the entire board — ice included — and your combo survives the wipe. It is not bought, not earned by watching anything, and not gated behind a currency. It is a resource the board itself gave you, and the interesting decision is when to spend it.
A bomb clears the 3×3 around where it lands, clipped at the edges. A rainbow block is a single cell that fits any gap you have left, which is exactly what you want when the board has gone patchy. Ice blocks take two clears to remove — one clear cracks them, the second takes them away — except when a bomb or a full-board wipe gets them, which does it in one.
Levels are not just harder endless runs. Each one sets its own goal — a number of lines, a score, or clearing every ice block on the board — and many come with a preset starting position and a move limit. The early ones teach on an empty board with no special pieces. The last ones hand you a dense field of ice and count your moves. Levels with a move limit award one to three stars depending on how much of the budget you had left.
The daily challenge is seeded from the local calendar date and generated on the device. Two phones set to the same day produce the same sequence of hands, with nothing downloaded. The home screen shows your result for the day and counts down to the next one.
Timed mode is the one place a clock exists. You start with ninety seconds, and every line you clear adds five more, so a run lasts exactly as long as you keep clearing. It has its own best score and it is entirely opt-in: endless, the levels and the daily still have nothing counting down.
When a run really does end, the game takes the board and the hand you were holding one move earlier and works out whether a better placement existed. If one did, it tells you how many lines that move could have cleared. If there was nothing better, it says nothing at all — being beaten by the position and being beaten by your own last move are different endings, and only one of them is worth pointing out.
Every rule — placement validity, line detection, the bomb blast, ice damage, scoring, combos, energy, the game-over test — lives in pure functions that hold no state and never touch the interface. Randomness comes from a seeded generator, never the system clock mid-game. The result is a game that behaves the same way twice, and a unit-test suite that says so.
The three pieces you get are not drawn blind. This is what happens between one hand being used up and the next appearing.
So a game ends when the pieces in your hand no longer fit — never when the pieces you were just given never fitted. The difference is the difference between losing and being told you lost.
Nothing. The shipped game makes no network requests: there is no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no account system and no backend behind it.
Your best score, which levels you have unlocked, the stars you earned, your result for today’s daily and your settings are kept in the device keychain. They are deleted with the app.
The daily challenge is computed from the date on your phone rather than fetched, which is why it works in airplane mode and why nothing about your play needs to be reported anywhere.
The only outbound links are the privacy policy, the terms and the support address in Settings, and those hand off to Safari or Mail.
Free. All four modes, every level, every special block and every theme are in the app from the first launch.
No ads of any kind — no banner, no interstitial between games, no rewarded video to continue a run. No in-app purchases, no currency, no energy timer, no daily-login reward loop.
Only in timed mode, which you have to choose. There you start with ninety seconds and each cleared line adds five. In endless, in the levels and in the daily, nothing falls and nothing counts down. A level can have a move limit, which is a budget rather than a clock — you can think about a move for as long as you want.
Neither, and both are deliberate. A piece goes down in the orientation you were dealt, and once it is down it stays down. That is what makes the decision before it worth making, and it is why there are no hints either.
Not at all. A line clears when it is full, regardless of what colour filled it. The seven colours exist to make the board readable — seven clearly separated hues on a dark tray, so an empty cell never reads as a filled one.
Space is not the test — fit is. The game ends when none of the pieces remaining in your hand can be placed anywhere. Scattered single cells can leave plenty of empty squares and still refuse every shape you are holding. When it happens, the game checks your previous move and tells you if a better one was available.
Never, including for the daily challenge, which is generated from the date on the device.