How to play

GAME takes a minute to learn and a long time to master. This page covers every rule, in order, with small live boards to try each one as you read. They run on exactly the same rules as the full game. When you've finished, the strategy guide shows how to read the board and clear it.

The aim, in one paragraph

The board is full of tiles of five kinds. Tap a group of two or more touching tiles of the same kind, and they go. The tiles above fall into the gaps, and empty columns close up. Keep going until no two touching tiles match. You score for every group you take, far more for big ones, and a bonus each time a whole kind is wiped off the board. Empty the board completely and you collect every bonus: that's the real prize.

The board and the five kinds

Every tile shows one of GAME's five characters:

• Frogkind 1
• Kennelkind 2
• Orangekind 3
• Tulipkind 4
• Chickkind 5

The kinds are only pictures: no kind is worth more than another, and none behaves differently. What matters is how many of each there are and where they sit.

A new game deals a full board at random. Each square gets any of the five kinds with equal chance, so each kind makes up about a fifth of the board, give or take: one deal might have 42 frogs and 27 oranges. There's no pattern to find in the deal, and every deal is different.

Board	Rows	Columns	Tiles	Where
Wide	9	19	171	The browser game on a wide screen, and the app's standard board. It's the 1995 original's board.
Upright	16	9	144	The browser game on a tall screen, such as a phone held upright
Small	9	16	144	In the app
Large	11	17	187	In the app

The small boards on this page are the same game in miniature: fewer rows, columns and sometimes kinds, so that one idea at a time stands out.

Groups: which tiles belong together

A group is a set of tiles of the same kind, each touching another in the set. Two tiles touch when they share a side: one directly above, below, left or right of the other. Tiles that only meet at a corner, diagonally, do not touch.

Touching is passed along. If a frog touches a second frog, and that frog touches a third, all three are one group, even though the first and the third don't touch each other. So a group can be any shape: a line, an L, a zigzag, a ring, or a sprawl across half the board.

A group needs at least two tiles. A tile with no neighbour of its own kind is a lone tile: tapping it does nothing, for now.

Taking a group

Tap any tile in a group, and the whole group goes at once, however big it is. You don't have to pick which tiles: the group is decided by the rule above, and it's all or nothing.

Tap a lone tile and it gives a little shake: nothing happens, and it costs nothing. There's no penalty for a tap that does nothing.

Every move is a single tap: there are no swaps, drags or rotations. The only way to change the board is to take a group. The only way to move a tile is to take something under it or to its left, so that it falls or slides. That's the whole game, and it's why the next two rules matter so much.

Falling

When a group goes, it leaves gaps. Every tile above a gap falls straight down until it lands on another tile or the bottom of the board. Tiles fall only downwards, never sideways, and they keep their order: a column is like a stack of plates.

Notice what falling does to the neighbours: the tiles that fell now touch different tiles from before. Two chicks that were separated by a frog touch once the frog has gone. That's how groups grow, and it's the most important thing to learn to see. The strategy guide calls it joining by gravity.

Sliding left

When every tile in a column has gone, the column is empty, and all the columns to its right slide one place to the left to close the gap. Columns only ever slide left, never right, and they slide as whole stacks: the tiles in them keep their heights.

A move can do both. First everything falls; then any empty column closes up. GAME shows them in that order: the group bursts, the tiles above fall, and then the columns slide.

What falling and sliding always do

Because tiles always fall and columns always close up, a board in GAME always has the same shape:

• No gaps under a tile. Every tile sits on the bottom row or on another tile.
• No empty columns in the middle. The columns in use are all together at the left; any empty columns are all at the right.
• The bottom row is solid. From the left edge, the bottom row has no gaps until the columns run out.
• The board shrinks down and to the left. As you play, the tiles settle towards the bottom-left corner. The top right empties first.

That last point has a lovely result, explained in the strategy guide: when only one kind is left on the board, it is always one single group.

Scoring: why a game starts below zero

GAME keeps score the way the original 1995 IBM game did (the rules were read straight from its code). The score has two parts that work against each other:

• Every tile on the board costs 1 point. So a new game starts at minus the number of tiles: −171 on the wide board. As tiles go, the cost goes with them.
• Every group earns (n − 2)² points, where n is its size. A pair earns 0, three tiles earn 1, four earn 4, ten earn 64.

Put together, taking a group of n tiles adds (n − 2)² + n to your score, which works out as n² − 3n + 4. That's the number the game shows when you point at a group:

So your score at any moment is simply: the (n − 2)² of every group you've taken, plus your bonuses (next but one), minus the tiles still on the board, minus 10 for each undo. Nothing else counts. There's no timer and no bonus for speed: take as long as you like over every move.

Bigger groups score far more

Because the points grow with the square of the size, one big group is worth far more than the same tiles taken in pieces. Ten tiles as five pairs add 10; as one group they add 74. Drag the slider:

These two boards are the same. Take the chicks straight away on one and be patient on the other:

Bonuses: clearing a whole kind

Take the last tile of a kind, so that there are no frogs (say) left anywhere on the board, and you earn a bonus. Each kind you clear is worth double the one before:

• 1001st kind
• 2002nd kind
• 4003rd kind
• 8004th kind
• 1,6005th kind

It doesn't matter which kind goes first: the first kind you clear pays 100, whichever it is, and the fifth pays 1,600. The fifth kind to go is the last tile on the board, so clearing the board earns 3,100 in bonuses (100 + 200 + 400 + 800 + 1,600). Clear four kinds and leave one tile of the fifth, and you get 1,500. That difference, 1,600 points for the very last tile, is why the strategy guide is mostly about keeping the clear alive.

For a sense of scale: the original's best recorded score, from 1997, is 3,455. A cleared board is worth 3,100 in bonuses before you count a single group.

When the game ends

The game ends when no two touching tiles match anywhere on the board: there's nothing left to take. It checks every tile, including the top row and the right-hand column. The tiles still on the board have already been costing you a point each, so they simply stay counted against you.

A game can end with a full-looking board if the tiles happen to have no matching neighbours. It can also end with a single tile left, which is the most painful way to lose the clear: one tile means one kind never cleared, and 1,600 points gone.

When the game ends, the panel shows your score, how many tiles and kinds were left, and your best on that board in this browser. From there you can play again or undo the last move. You can also close the panel (with its close button, or Esc) to look at the finished board, or go back to the website.

Undo

Changed your mind? Undo steps back one move, as many times as you like, all the way to the start. Each undo costs 10 points, and it takes back exactly what the move earned: its group points, and any bonus it paid.

• In the browser game: the curved-arrow button on the plank, or the U key.
• After the game ends: "Undo the last move" on the game-over panel.
• On this page's boards, Undo is free: they're for learning.

Ten points is cheap next to a 1,600 bonus. Good players use undo to explore: try a line, see where it leads, and step back. The app's high-score tables show how many undos each score took, so you'll always know which games were played straight.

Reading the screen: counters, the dog and the score

The counters

The wooden plank along the bottom shows how many of each kind are left. Use them constantly: a counter at 1 means that kind can never be cleared (one tile can't make a group), and a counter at 2 or 3 tells you exactly how many tiles you must bring together.

A count changes colour when its kind is plentiful: more than its fair fifth of the tiles dealt.

• 31 under 23%: plain
• 40 23–25%: cyan
• 45 26–28%: yellow
• 50 29% or more: red

The percentage is of the tiles dealt (171 on the wide board), so the colours show the deal's big kinds at the start and fade to plain as those kinds are taken.

The dog

The dog beside the score watches your moves. It reacts to the group under your pointer, so you can see at a glance whether a group is worth taking, and after each move to the group you took:

• Sad
  2 or 3 tiles
• Perks up
  4 or 5 tiles
• Happy
  6 to 9 tiles
• Delighted
  10 or more

When the game ends, the dog lies down. (Don't let a sad dog bully you: pairs are often exactly the right move.)

The score

The score counts up (or down) as it changes. While you point at a group, the word "Score" above it becomes what the group would do, such as "8 tiles, +44". Bonuses fly up across the board as they're won.

Controls: mouse, touch and keyboard

A press and hold never takes a group, so on a touch screen you can look safely. The "i" button in the corner of the Play page explains the browser game, and the speaker buttons turn music and sound effects on and off. They start off, and GAME remembers your choice.

Your best score for each board shape is kept in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere: there are no accounts.

Your first board

Everything together, on a small board. It can be cleared, but not every way works: the board tells you the moment a move makes a clear impossible.

What the app adds

The browser game is the basic game. The app, out now on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro and coming to Android, Windows and Linux, plays by the same rules and adds:

• Magic potions. Three a game. A potion turns one tile into a kind picked at random, for 100 points. It can come out as the kind it already was, and it can't be undone, but with luck it rescues a lone tile and the clear with it.
• Hints. Stop to think, and GAME points to a group to tap and marks the kind to keep for last. A game with a hint goes on its own high-score table.
• Watch GAME play. After any game, watch GAME play the same board, thinking as it goes.
• Lessons with live boards, like this page's, inside the game.
• Three board sizes, each with its own top 20, and every game replayable from the same deal.
• Game Center leaderboards on Apple devices, and on Apple Vision Pro, a whole world on your table.

The rules on one card