Falling Blocks
Stacking Against a Rising Clock
Seven shapes, four squares each, arriving one at a time. You rotate and slide each one into the pile below. Fill a row completely and it clears; leave a square uncovered and it stays there, under everything you place afterward. The fall rate climbs as you clear lines, up to level 15, and every game ends the same way: the pile grows faster than you can flatten it.
Why the Pile Never Tidies Itself
Every piece you drop either adds structure or buries a hole, and a buried hole cannot be reached again until the rows above it clear. There is no move that directly undoes an earlier one. That gap between how cheap it is to make a mess and how expensive it is to unmake one is the ordinary face of entropy: left alone, a system drifts toward the arrangements there are simply more of, and there are vastly more ragged stacks than clean ones. Playing well means budgeting for a cost that only ever runs one way.
How to play
- Left and right shift the piece, up turns it, down speeds it and Space drops it; C holds it for later, and P pauses.
- Clearing four rows in one move scores twice what four single rows do.
- Keep the surface flat and one column open for the long piece.
- Speed steps up every ten lines, so how far you get is set by how tidy the stack was before the pace changed.
