Gameplay Guide

Everything rises. Your job is to keep it from reaching the top. Here's how every piece of the puzzle fits together.

The Playing Field

The board is a tall grid, six columns wide. Colored blocks fill the lower portion and continuously rise from the bottom at a speed that increases over time. If any block crosses the ceiling, the game ends.

Your only tool is a two-cell horizontal cursor that highlights two adjacent blocks. Move it in four directions with the d-pad. Press the swap button and the two highlighted blocks switch places. That's the entire control scheme. One button, infinite depth.

The Five Block Types

Every version of the game uses the same five core block shapes, each in a distinct color. The shapes are purely cosmetic; what matters is the color. Three or more of the same color aligned vertically or horizontally will clear.

Some modes introduce a sixth block (a dark navy triangle). Adding it makes chains harder to set up because there are more colors competing for space, but it also reduces unintended matches that can interrupt your plans.

The exclamation block (!) appears in certain modes as a special panel. It generates independent garbage blocks when cleared and follows its own rules.

Clearing & Gravity

When three or more blocks of the same color line up horizontally or vertically, they flash briefly and then vanish. Any block sitting above the cleared space immediately falls due to gravity. This is the foundation of every advanced technique in the game.

A combo happens when you clear more than three blocks in a single match. Lining up five green circles in a row, for example, counts as a 5-combo. Combos are worth more points and send more garbage in versus mode than a standard 3-block clear.

A chain occurs when blocks falling after a clear land and immediately form a new match. The newly formed match counts as the second link in the chain. If that clear causes more blocks to fall into yet another match, the chain keeps extending. Chains are the single most important mechanic in competitive play and are covered in depth on the Chains page.

Garbage Blocks

In versus mode, every combo and chain you pull off drops garbage onto your opponent's board. Garbage arrives as oversized multi-column blocks that can't be swapped or moved normally. They sit there taking up space and pushing the stack closer to the ceiling.

To break garbage, clear any normal blocks that are touching it. The bottom row of the garbage converts into regular colored blocks, which then fall and can be used for further clears. If the garbage block is multiple rows tall, each row converts one at a time with roughly a one-second delay per layer.

Skilled players treat incoming garbage not as a punishment but as an opportunity. The converted blocks are visible before they fall, which means you can plan chains using the garbage itself, turning your opponent's attack into fuel for a devastating counterattack.

Game Modes

Scoring Fundamentals

Points come from three sources: basic clears, combos, and chains. A standard 3-block clear is worth the least. Combos (4+ blocks in one clear) award a bonus that scales with the number of blocks removed. Chains are where the real points live. Each successive link in a chain multiplies the reward dramatically.

Competitive Time Trial players routinely ignore basic clears entirely, spending the opening seconds building tall stacks specifically so they can execute long chains worth thousands of points each. A single 13-hit chain can outscore minutes of casual play.

At the highest level, the chain counter display can't keep up. The original SNES version only shows chain counts up to 13 before switching to a ? symbol. A known bug causes chains beyond this point to award zero bonus points, though community-made patches exist to fix it.