Block Puzzle
Drop blocks onto an eight by eight grid and fill a whole row or a whole column to wipe it. Nothing installs, nothing asks you to sign in, and no clock is running. What makes it hard is that pieces never turn and nothing you place can be picked back up, so the board you leave behind after three moves is the board you have to work with.
The rules this board runs on
- Drag a piece out of the tray and drop it on the grid. Tapping the piece and then tapping a square works too, with a mouse or a finger.
- A piece lands only where every one of its squares has an empty square waiting. Drop it anywhere else and nothing happens at all: no penalty, no lost piece.
- Fill all eight squares of a row, or all eight of a column, and it clears. A placement that finishes a row and a column at once clears both of them.
- Cleared squares empty where they are. Nothing falls and nothing slides across, so the gaps you leave stay exactly where you left them.
- The tray holds three pieces and refills only once all three are gone. You are always spending three placements, not one.
- A piece with no legal square left anywhere goes grey and dim in the tray. Once none of the pieces still in the tray has a square to go to, the run is over.
There is no rotate control, and the absence is a decision rather than a missing button. A shape arrives the way you see it and lands the way you see it, so the only thing you choose is where. Both orientations of every bar, all four turns of the small L and all four of the T come through the tray as pieces in their own right, which is how the variety survives without a rotate key.
There is no undo either. Sort Puzzle hands you an undo key, and the sudoku board keeps one that takes back the last digit you wrote. This board has neither, so a placement is final the instant you let go of it.
How a placement is scored
Every placement pays three points for each square the piece covers. A single block is worth 3, a four square piece 12, and the three by three square 27. Those points arrive whether or not anything clears, which is why a big awkward shape is still worth putting down while you have room for it.
Clearing lines pays on top, and it does not pay in a straight line. One line is worth 10. Two lines finished by the same placement are worth 30, three are worth 60, four are worth 100. More than four in one placement is possible, because a bar standing in a nearly full column can finish several rows and that column together, but the tray rarely hands you the shape and the board at the same time.
| Lines cleared by one placement | Points |
|---|---|
| 1 | 10 |
| 2 | 30 |
| 3 | 60 |
| 4 | 100 |
Clear something on two placements in a row and a combo badge appears in the header. The second clear in a chain pays double, the third triple, and the multiplier keeps climbing by one for every consecutive clearing placement until it reaches eight, where it stops. One placement that clears nothing sets the chain back to zero.
That ladder has a consequence worth working out before you plan a move. Single clears on consecutive placements pay 10, then 20, then 30, then 40, and those figures add up to exactly what one placement clearing the same number of lines pays: 30 for two, 60 for three, 100 for four. The line points come out even either way. What differs is the price and what you are left holding. The multi line clear spends one piece where the run of singles spends four, and the run finishes with the chain four clears deep, so the clear after it is worth five times the plain figure while the clear after a quadruple is worth only double.
The best figure in the header is the highest score this browser has stored, counting runs from either mode. It lives in your browser and not on a server.
The piece set, and how often each shape turns up
Twenty nine shapes can arrive in the tray: a single square, eight straight bars, three rectangles, four small L pieces, four large L pieces, four T pieces, four S and Z pieces, and the three by three square. A piece covers one, two, three, four, five, six or nine squares, and nothing else.
The draw is weighted rather than even. Each shape carries a weight, and the weights add up to 90. The eight straight bars hold 36 of that total between them, so a bar is the piece to expect. Five shapes sit at a weight of 1 and are the rarest things the tray hands you: the three by three square and the four large L pieces. The single square holds 3, which is worth remembering before you leave a hole one square wide.
That weighting is the difficulty dial. The flexible little pieces have to stay common or an eight by eight board jams inside a minute, and the big awkward ones have to show up or a careful player never loses.
Each piece also carries one of seven colours. A colour changes nothing about where a piece fits or what it scores, and it stays on the board where the piece lands, so you can see at a glance which lump went down together.
Daily board and free play
Daily board
The daily takes its seed from the date in UTC, so everyone who opens the page today is handed the same pieces in the same order. That is what makes the table underneath worth reading: a list of scores from randomly dealt runs measures the deal rather than the player.
Because the date is the seed, pressing Play again deals you the identical sequence, which makes a replay practice rather than a second run at the table.
The date is in the leaderboard key as well, so today's table ranks only runs from today's pieces. When a run ends you are shown where you landed as a percentage of everyone who has posted today.
Midnight UTC is where the day breaks, not your own local midnight, because two people comparing scores have to have played the same board.
A worked opening on the daily
A daily always starts on an empty grid, so the first three placements are the part you can plan before anything has gone wrong. Say the tray opens with the three by three square, a five long bar and a two long bar.
- Put the square in the top left corner, three rows deep and three columns wide. Nine squares covered, 27 points, nothing cleared. Running score 27.
- Lay the five long bar flat along the top row, in the five columns the square left open. The top row now holds all eight and clears. Fifteen points for the bar and 10 for the line. Running score 52.
- Stand the two long bar upright against the right edge of the block the square left behind. Six points, no clear, and the chain resets to zero. Running score 58.
Two things come out of that. The top row cleared and the six squares underneath it did not move, because nothing falls on this board. And the chain never got going: the bar cleared, the placement after it did not, so the multiplier that pays double was never in play.
Free play
Free play seeds itself fresh for every run, so the sequence is yours alone. Nothing is submitted anywhere, which is the honest answer for a private board: a score from a sequence nobody else played has nothing to be ranked against.
The grid, the piece set and the weights are identical to the daily. What changes is that you can start over as often as you like without spending the day's one entry.
A worked first move in free play
Free play begins the same way, and the very first placement sets the arithmetic for everything after it. Say the tray opens with a five long bar.
- Lay the bar flat against the left edge of a row. Fifteen points, no clear, and a gap of exactly three squares left at the other end of that row.
Eight minus five is three, and a three long bar finishes that row on its own. Slide the same piece one square in from the edge instead and the row is left needing one square on one side and two on the other, which is two more placements rather than one. A gap one square wide can be filled by exactly one shape in the whole set, so leaving one is a bet on a single draw. A gap of three across takes the three long bar, which is one of the commonest things in the tray.
How to keep an eight by eight board open
Count to eight before you place anything
The grid is eight wide and eight tall, and no piece spans more than five squares across or five down. So no piece finishes a row by itself, and a row you mean to clear costs two placements at the very least. Eight splits cleanly as five and three, as four and four, and as three and three and two. Leave gaps that match those numbers and the pieces you draw will fit them.
Plan the whole tray, not the piece in your hand
Fresh pieces arrive only once all three slots are empty, so you can see the full cost of the next three placements before you commit to the first one. Put the most awkward of the three down first, while the board still has room for it. Saving the three by three square for last is how a comfortable position turns into a dead one.
Aim for the crossing
A row and a column that both need the same square are the best thing on the board. Set up a row missing only one square and a column missing that same square, drop a single block into it, and fifteen squares come off the board for 33 points. That same block dropped in an empty corner pays 3. The gain is not really in the line points, since the ladder pays the same 30 for two clears taken on two consecutive placements; it is that one small piece did the work of two and the board opened up in a single move.
Decide about the chain before you place, not after
While a chain is running, a tidying up move is expensive, because it costs the doubled or tripled clear that would have come next and drops the ladder back to the bottom. Sometimes letting the chain die is still right, especially when the alternative is forcing a clear into the last open corner you have. Make that call while the piece is still in the tray.
Watch for the grey piece
A piece with nowhere legal left to go fades to grey where it sits in the tray. That is worth watching for, because it shows up while you still have two other pieces in hand to open the board back up. If two of the three have gone grey, the one that still fits is your last move unless it clears a line: the tray refills only once all three slots are empty, so the two grey pieces are still sitting there when the placement is done.
Use the preview
Drag a piece over the grid and the squares it would fill light up underneath it. When the spot will not take it, the floating piece dims instead of snapping into place. On a touchscreen the piece rides a little above your finger so you can see what is under it. With a mouse, pick a piece in the tray and hover over the grid for the same preview.
Questions about this block puzzle
Why is my daily score missing from the table?
The table takes one score per browser per day, so after you have submitted, a replay shows a note saying your score is already up instead of the entry form. The table also needs a working connection; when the request fails the panel says so rather than showing an out of date list.
Does my score follow me to another device?
Only the daily score you submit, and only onto that day's public table. The best figure in the header is stored in the browser you are using, so a different phone or a private window starts you at zero.
Can I play with the keyboard?
Not on this board. The tray picks a piece up on a pointer press and the grid squares are not in the tab order, so a keyboard on its own cannot choose a piece or choose a square. A mouse, a trackpad and a touchscreen all work, and the tap path is there for anyone who would rather not drag.
When you want a different kind of board
Block Puzzle is the board on this site where nothing can be taken back. If that is not the mood you are in, the rest of the shelf asks for something else.
- Sort PuzzleTip coloured blocks between bottles until no bottle is holding a mix. It has the undo key this board does not, so a wrong pour costs a tap rather than a run.
- SudokuA nine by nine grid where each row, each column and each box has to end up holding 1 to 9. Reasoning rather than packing, and a wrong digit can be taken back.
- Mahjong SolitaireTake a stack of tiles apart by matching free pairs. Every board is built to be solvable, so the puzzle is reading the stack rather than hoping.
- Word searchTwenty four themed grids with words running in up to eight directions. Scanning and pattern spotting, with no piece to place at all.
- Brain gamesThe hub that lists every game on the site, this board included.