Block Puzzle
Mouse and keyboard
- Left and right arrows, or A and D, to move.
- Up arrow or X to rotate clockwise; Z to rotate anticlockwise.
- Down arrow or S to soft drop, one point per row.
- Space to hard drop, two points per row, locking immediately.
- C or Shift to hold. P or Enter to pause and resume; the game also pauses when you switch tabs.
- Hold left, right or down and the piece keeps moving: a 150-millisecond delay, then one column every 40 milliseconds.
- Rotation follows the standard rotation system with wall kicks, so a piece against the wall turns instead of refusing.
Touch
- Drag left or right across the field to move the piece a column at a time.
- Tap the field to rotate clockwise.
- Flick downwards to hard drop.
- Or use the six buttons under the board: move, rotate, hold, soft drop and drop. Holding a move button repeats it.
- Tap the field or press any control to start; there is no countdown.
This panel
- F full screen
- M sound on or off
- ? this list
- Esc close, or leave full screen
- The clock stops while the board is off screen
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| Board | Played | Won | Drawn | Win rate | Best | Fastest | Best run |
|---|
Awards for Block Puzzle
- Line boss Reach level three in Block Puzzle — thirty lines cleared. —
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About Block Puzzle
Seven shapes, ten columns, and a hold slot.
Seven shapes, ten columns, and a stack that only ever gets taller. The falling-block puzzle is the purest test of planning under time pressure that anyone has managed to fit into a handful of rules, and it has survived four decades essentially unchanged because none of those rules can be removed without breaking it.
This is a from-scratch implementation built to the modern standard rather than an approximation of it. That means a field ten columns wide, the standard scoring table where four rows cleared at once pays 800 points against your level, a seven-bag randomiser that deals every shape before repeating any, wall kicks so a piece rotates against a wall instead of refusing, a hold slot, a five-piece preview, and a lock delay that gives you a moment to slide a piece after it lands.
Those details are the game. A field twelve columns wide is easier in a way that makes the scores meaningless. A purely random piece sequence can starve you of the straight piece for thirty turns and turn a planning game into a luck game. Rotation without wall kicks means the column against the edge is unusable. Every one of them is in here because leaving it out produces something that looks like the game and does not play like it.
Also searched for as
- falling blocks
- block stacking game
- brick game
- block drop
- blocks puzzle
Whichever name you know it by, it is the same game: it runs in this browser, with no download and no sign-up.
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How to play Block Puzzle
- Seven shapes fall one at a time into a field ten columns wide and twenty rows tall. Move and rotate each one before it lands.
- Fill a row completely across all ten columns and it clears, dropping everything above it down by one.
- Clearing four rows at once with a single straight piece is worth 800 points against your level — eight times what four separate single rows pay.
- Press hold to park the current piece and swap it for whatever you stored earlier. You get one hold per piece, and it resets when the piece lands.
- The shaded outline at the bottom of the field shows exactly where a hard drop Sends the piece straight to the bottom and locks it there immediately. will put the piece. Use it rather than guessing.
- Every ten rows cleared raises the level, and each level shortens the time a piece takes to fall one row.
- The game ends when a new piece has no room to appear.
Strategy that actually helps
- Keep the stack flat and low. A flat surface accepts every one of the seven shapes; a jagged one rejects most of them, and the piece you cannot place is the piece that ends the game.
- Leave your well on the left or the right, never in the middle. A centre well needs a straight piece dropped precisely, while an edge well can also be fed by the L and J shapes.
- Never cover a hole. A single buried gap costs you every row above it until you dig it out, and digging costs more rows than the clear was worth.
- The randomiser deals all seven shapes before repeating any, so the longest you can ever wait for a straight piece is twelve pieces. Count from the last one and you know exactly how deep a well you can afford.
- Use the hold slot as a bank, not a bin. Storing a straight piece early and keeping it for a four-row clear is worth more than spending it to fix one awkward row.
- At high levels stop rotating in the air. Decide the orientation while the piece is still near the top, then move and drop — the lock delay gives you a moment to slide, not to think.
Controls
Mouse and keyboard
- Left and right arrows, or A and D, to move.
- Up arrow or X to rotate clockwise; Z to rotate anticlockwise.
- Down arrow or S to soft drop, one point per row.
- Space to hard drop, two points per row, locking immediately.
- C or Shift to hold. P or Enter to pause and resume; the game also pauses when you switch tabs.
- Hold left, right or down and the piece keeps moving: a 150-millisecond delay, then one column every 40 milliseconds.
- Rotation follows the standard rotation system with wall kicks, so a piece against the wall turns instead of refusing.
Touch
- Drag left or right across the field to move the piece a column at a time.
- Tap the field to rotate clockwise.
- Flick downwards to hard drop.
- Or use the six buttons under the board: move, rotate, hold, soft drop and drop. Holding a move button repeats it.
- Tap the field or press any control to start; there is no countdown.