Blockfall
Two stacks, one sequence of pieces, played live: both of you at your screens at once. Pieces fall into your stack; turn them and slide them; fill a row and it vanishes. Clear two or more rows at once and the extra lands on the other player as garbage. The stack that reaches the top loses.
The rules
- Each of you has a stack ten columns wide and twenty rows tall, and you both get the same sequence of pieces, seven at a time in a shuffled bag, so neither of you is luckier than the other.
- A piece appears at the top and falls on its own. Move it left and right, turn it, drop it straight down, or hold it for later: one hold slot, and a held piece comes back when you next press hold.
- Turning near a wall nudges the piece sideways by up to two cells to make room; if there is no room even then, the turn does nothing.
- When a piece lands it locks, and every full row vanishes. One row sends nothing; two rows send one line of garbage to the other player, three rows send two, and four rows at once send four. Four straight after another four sends one more.
- Garbage rises under the other player's stack after their next piece locks, as rows with one hole, the same column all the way up the batch. If you have garbage coming and you clear rows, your lines cancel it first, oldest batch first, and only what is left is sent.
- Every twenty-five pieces the level rises and the pieces fall faster.
The clock, and what "deadline" means here
- This is a live game. You press Ready, the other player presses Ready, three seconds count down, and both stacks are live from then on.
- Every piece has a time budget: twenty rows of falling at the level's speed plus a moment to settle, never less than four seconds, with two seconds of grace for a slow connection. A piece you have not placed by then is dropped where it stands, straight down, by the server, and the next one appears. Walk away and your stack fills itself in about three minutes.
- The site's usual deadline, one minute a move, is the fallback for a game both players have left: if nobody has placed anything for a minute the game is abandoned, unrated. It is never what decides a game between two people who are playing.
How a game ends
- When a piece cannot appear because your stack has reached the top, you are out, and the other player wins.
- If both stacks reach the top in the same moment, the game is a draw.
- A game runs to at most three hundred pieces each. If both players get there, the one who sent more garbage wins, then the one who cleared more rows; equal on both is a draw.
- A resignation ends the game against the player who resigned. A player who never presses Ready forfeits at the site's deadline.
Worth knowing before you start
- Keep the stack flat and avoid holes: a cell covered by a piece above it costs a whole row until you dig it out.
- A tall stack with one column left open is worth four rows at once, and four rows send four. It is also the fastest way to lose if the piece you need does not come.
- Garbage that is coming shows as a red bar beside your stack. Clearing rows before your next piece locks cancels it; ignoring it is a choice.
- Every placement is judged by the server on the stack as you saw it, so a batch that arrives while your piece is falling never spoils the placement you were making.
The seed decides the sequence of pieces and where the hole is in every batch of garbage, and it is published when the game ends. Every placement carries the time it was made, and every piece the clock dropped is in the log with the deadline it missed.
Blockfall terms
- Garbage
- Rows with one hole that rise under a stack when the other player clears two or more rows at once.
- The bag
- Seven pieces, one of each, shuffled; the sequence is bag after bag, so no piece is ever more than twelve pieces away.
- Hold
- One slot beside the stack. Put the falling piece in it and the held one comes out; once per piece.
- Topping out
- A stack so tall the next piece cannot appear. That stack loses.