Everything you score comes from one of these. Nothing is hidden and nothing is random.
A piece is the shape you drag. A cell is one square of it. The board is made of the same squares, so a six-cell piece covers six cells of the board. Every number below counts cells.
That is the golden F: one piece, six cells.
| Every cell you put on the board | 1 each |
A five-cell piece is 5 points just for landing. It adds up quietly, and it is not where the game is won.
A full row, a full column or a full 3×3 box clears. Clearing more than one at the same time pays far more than clearing them one after another:
| 1 at once | 10 |
| 2 at once | 40 |
| 3 at once | 90 |
| 4 at once | 160 |
Four separate single clears are 40 points. The same four in one move is 160. Setting them up is the whole game.
Clear something on consecutive moves and a streak builds. It counts lines, not moves — every line you have already cleared in the streak adds 5 to your next clear:
| clear 1 line, then 1 more | +5 |
| …and a third | +10 |
| clear 3 at once, then 2 more | +15 |
| …and 1 more after that | +25 |
So holding a piece back to turn a double into a triple pays twice: once for the bigger clear, and again on everything you clear next. That is what the bank is for.
A first clear never pays a streak bonus, however big — clearing several at once is already paid above. One move that clears nothing ends the streak.
Not a single cell left. What it pays depends on how far you have come since the last time you did it — an empty board early in a game is half luck, and after a clear you are standing on one:
| under 500 points since the last one | 100 |
| 500 or more | 400 |
| 2000 or more, with a locked piece in play | 1000 |
Clearing the board resets that count to zero.
About one piece in 60 is gold — so one tray in twenty carries one. It is a 6-cell F, and it is worth far more taken all at once than taken a bit at a time — that choice is the point of the piece.
What pays is whole F's consumed in one move — not how many gold cells went, and not where on the board they sat.
| Any gold cell that finished no F | 10 a cell |
| MEGA — one whole F, in ONE move | 200 |
| GIGA — TWO whole F's, in one move | 500 |
| TERA — three, which may never happen | 1,100 |
| GOLDEN BOX — a 3×3 box, gold in all nine | +100 on top |
So a whole F cleared at once pays 200. The same 6 cells taken two at a time pay 60. Waiting is worth it — and waiting for the second F is worth more again.
The golden box is a bonus on top of whatever the F's paid, never instead of it. Nothing you add to a move can make it pay less.
About one piece in 10 arrives with a single cell marked by a plus. Clear that cell and the whole drop pays more — the blocks, the lines, the streak, the gold and the board clear, all of it.
The bigger the plus, the more it pays. There are three, and the larger two only start appearing once you are deep into a game:
| A marked cell, cleared | +10% |
| From 10,000 points, richer marks appear | +20% |
| From 12,000 points, richer still | +50% |
The mark sits on the board until something clears it, so the question is never whether to take it but when. Taken on a plain single line it is worth a point or two; taken by the move that empties the board it is worth hundreds. Waiting is worth it here too.
Two marked cells in the same clear multiply rather than add: 10% and 20% together pay +32%, not +30%.
Every finished game is submitted once, when it ends. The scoreboard is two choices: when, and what.
When — Day, Week, Month, Year and All-Time. A game counts towards every one of them at once; they are five views of the same games, not five separate contests.
What — four different questions, and they reward completely different play:
| Top score | your single best game |
| Accumulated | every game added up |
| Average | your total divided by games played |
| Best drop | the most any single placement paid |
Top score rewards one great run. Accumulated rewards playing a lot — a hundred ordinary games will beat one brilliant one. Average is the opposite: it punishes playing a lot, because every weak game drags it down. Best drop ignores the game around it completely and asks only what your single best placement paid: one perfect move still counts in full on a board you went on to lose.
The Average board asks you to qualify first. An average is the one figure a single game can win outright — play once, score well, stop, and stand above a season of honest play forever — so it ranks nobody until they have played enough games for one of them to stop deciding it. The bar grows with the period: 2 games for every day it has been running, so a board is enterable on its first day and asks its full price by the middle. It stops at 2 games in a day, 10 in a week, 20 in a month and 50 in a year; All-Time does not grow and asks a flat 100. Below it the board tells you how many more you owe rather than calling you unranked. The other three need no such bar: Top score and Best drop ask for a best, and Accumulated is a sum, so playing more can only ever help you there.
Best drop is also the one board you can watch. The leader's placement is stored as a position — the board, the piece and where it went — so tapping it replays that move on a real game screen rather than showing you a number.
Periods close on UTC, not on your own clock — the day rolls over at 02:00 in Spanish summer and 01:00 in winter. The board shows the exact local time under the tabs, so a late game landing in tomorrow is never a surprise. All-Time never closes.
The trophy figure in the game header is something else again: your own all-time best score, kept on your phone. It is there whether or not you have joined the competition, and it is what the game measures you against when it says you have beaten a record.
There is a second personal record, and it belongs to a single move rather than a whole game: your best drop ever. When a placement pays enough to be worth totalling, the whole figure appears on the board once the individual parts have flown, and if it beats that record it arrives in gold. This one follows you rather than the phone — signing in on a new device fetches it back from the competition, so a fresh install never hands you an easy record to break.
Pieces grow with your score, and they grow faster when the board is empty — space invites big pieces. That is deliberate: a roomy board handing out small pieces is a game that never ends.
At 2000 points one of your three pieces arrives locked and cannot be turned. At 4000, two of the three are locked. Locked pieces come slightly smaller in exchange — the game takes the turn away and gives a little size back.
At 6000 points the game starts giving something back: a green arrow beside the tray slides it aside and shows you the next three pieces. Looking is free, and it changes nothing about what you are dealt.
At 8000 points the one piece you can still turn arrives with four turns on it, counted by the studs underneath it. Four is enough to reach any orientation a piece has, so decide where it is going before you start turning it — the only way to run out is to turn for the sake of turning.
At 10,000 points the marked cells start paying more — a larger plus worth +20% — and at 12,000 the largest of all, worth +50% of everything a single drop pays.
And from 6000 points on, every 2000 points unlocks a new shape. The game tells you when one arrives and shows you the piece. There are a great many of them and the last one is a very long way up; nobody has met them all.