Glintwell Match

Glintwell Match is a match-three built for one thumb and a hundred levels. Swap two pieces that touch, line up three or more of a colour, and everything above them falls into the gap — which is where the game actually happens, because a fall that lands on another match scores again at a higher multiplier, and a board set up properly comes apart in four or five stages from a single move.

Four moves' worth of thinking is built into the pieces themselves. Four in a row leaves a rocket that clears the line it is fired along. An L or a T leaves a bomb. Five in a row leaves a prism, which takes every piece of whatever colour you swap it into. Put two of them together and you get a third thing again: two rockets crossed, a bomb and a rocket, two prisms. None of it is explained on a card — the pieces are made where you make them, and the first time one goes off is the lesson.

The hundred levels run through ten episodes, each with its own colour and its own last level, which is harder than the nine before it. What a level asks for changes as you go: reach a score, peel every square of jelly, break every crate — and, more often than not, two of those at once. Ice does not count towards anything; it holds the piece inside it still and is in your way, which is the job it has in this genre and the job it has here.

The difficulty was measured rather than estimated. Before it shipped, every level was played twelve times by a test player, its move count moved up or down by what the result said, and played again — until an ordinary level came out winnable between seven and nine and a half times in ten, and an episode's last level between four and seven. Nothing in the game is random in the sense of unfair: a level's board comes from its number, so yours is the same board as everyone else's, and the daily challenge is the same board for everybody in the world on the same date.

It needs no account, no network and no download, it remembers where you got to in your own browser, and there is not a single audio file in it — every sound is made in the browser as it plays.