On an 8×8 board, swap a gem with the one next to it so that three or more of a kind line up. The matched gems vanish, everything above drops into the gap and fresh gems fall in from the top. When those falling gems land in another three, the chain continues and the score multiplier climbs. There is no clock — you get thirty moves — so thinking about a move costs nothing. The best score is kept in this browser, and nothing is installed.
Each cleared gem is worth 10 points; clearing four at once raises that to 15 per gem and five or more to 20. The chain step multiplies the total.
If no legal swap remains anywhere on the board, the same gems are reshuffled into new positions. No new gems are introduced, and reshuffling costs no moves.
A fresh board never starts with a match already on it, and it always has at least one legal swap.
The best score lives in this browser (localStorage) and is never sent to a server.
The board is 8×8 and there are six kinds of gem. Swap two adjacent squares so that three or more identical gems line up horizontally or vertically, and those gems clear; whatever sat above them falls into the gap and new gems drop in from the top.
One constraint shapes everything: a swap that creates no match is refused. You cannot shuffle around hoping something lands, so the game is about reading the board rather than about speed.
This page counts moves rather than seconds. Thirty moves and the round is over, which means the score comes from how much each move is worth rather than from how fast you can tap — the reason it plays well on a phone at a relaxed pace.
A cleared gem is worth 10 points. Clear four in one move and each is worth 15; five or more and each is worth 20. So the decision between settling for three and setting up four shows up directly in the score.
On top of that sits the chain multiplier. If the gems that fall into the gap form another match, that is step two; if the result of that forms another, step three. Clearing five gems on a three-step chain is 5 × 20 × 3 = 300 points, where the same five on the first step are 100.
Chains cannot be forced, but their odds can be raised. Clearing low on the board pulls a large column of gems downward, and every one of them is another chance to land in a match. Clearing near the top moves almost nothing and rarely chains.
That gives you the first real habit of the game: look at the bottom first. Given two moves of equal face value, the lower one is usually worth more.
Before you tap, look for four rather than three. A line of three very often has a fourth gem of the same kind one square off the line, and moving that one instead pays five extra points per gem.
Also look at what will fall. If two gems of the same colour sit directly above the row you are about to clear, they land together and the odds of a chain jump. That makes the move worth more than another move that clears the same number of gems.
Save the edges and corners for later. Gems on the rim have fewer directions to move in, so leaving them untouched too long is what brings on a board with no legal swaps.
When you drop below five remaining moves, change strategy. Chasing chains is a probability play and it stops paying when there are too few moves left to absorb a miss — take the certain four or five instead.
Fill an 8×8 grid with six kinds of gem and you will occasionally reach a position where no swap anywhere produces a match. The board has to be reshuffled for play to continue.
This is where implementations differ. Generating a brand new board introduces gems that were never there and quietly discards the position you built. This page keeps the exact multiset of gems and only moves them — the same ingredients, rearranged.
If the reshuffled board is itself locked, or starts with a match already made, it is shuffled again. And the reshuffle never costs a move, because the situation was not created by your decision.
Match 3 looks simple, and yet finding the move order that maximises the score belongs to the computationally hard family. The best-known games in the genre have been studied formally, and the results point the same way: optimal play cannot be computed efficiently.
The reason is the cascade. One move rewrites the top of the board, and that rewrite changes which moves exist afterwards. To calculate two moves ahead exactly, you would need to know the random gems that have not been generated yet, which is not knowledge anyone can have.
What is left for a person is choosing moves with a better expected value. Clear low, aim for four or more, and keep the edges workable — those three habits genuinely move that expectation.
Gems differ by symbol as well as by colour. Distinguishing them by colour alone would collapse the board into one shape for a colour-blind player, which does not make the game harder — it makes it unplayable.
The board is processed in rounds of clear, gravity, refill and re-check. Rule calculation is fully separated from the screen: a pure function produces the list of cascade steps, and the display simply plays them back a beat at a time.
A fresh board is generated until it has no pre-made match and at least one legal swap. Only the matched cells are redrawn rather than the whole board, because regenerating 64 squares until they happen to be clean takes far longer.
Input is blocked while a cascade is playing. A tap during the animation would refer to the board on screen, which is already a step behind the real one.
The best score stays in this browser. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no global leaderboard, and clearing site data clears the record.
Swap two adjacent gems so that three or more of the same kind end up in a row or column; those gems clear. A swap that produces no match does not happen at all, and after thirty moves the round ends.
Gems fall in to fill the cleared space, and if they happen to land in another three the chain reaches step two, then three, and so on. The step number is the multiplier, so a three-step chain pays triple for the same number of gems.
Yes. Three gems pay 10 each, four pay 15 each and five or more pay 20 each. A line of three is often one square away from being a line of four, so it is worth a second look before you tap.
The board reshuffles automatically. The gems themselves are kept and only their positions change — inventing new gems would quietly alter the difficulty of the board — and the reshuffle does not spend a move.
Yes. Either tap two gems or drag one toward its neighbour. Nothing is installed, no account is needed, and it keeps working offline.
What this tool bases its numbers on, and how far those numbers go.
The board is 8×8 with 6 kinds of gem. A move is a swap of two adjacent squares and is legal only when it creates a line of three or more. A cleared gem is worth 10 points (15 each when four clear at once, 20 when five or more), multiplied by the chain step. A round is 30 moves.Clearing five gems on chain step 3 scores 5 × 20 × 3 = 300. The same five gems with no chain score 5 × 20 × 1 = 100.