Our games

A physics merge puzzle

Stones drop into a jar. Two of the same kind that touch become one stone of the next kind. Sand becomes clay, clay becomes moss, and so on up an eleven-step ladder that ends at cut gemstones. There is a danger line near the top of the jar, and if a settled stone sits above it for more than a moment the run ends.

Unlike grid-based merge games, positions here are decided by a physics simulation. A stone rolls off its neighbours, wedges into a gap, or knocks a stack sideways. That makes placement a judgement call rather than a fixed slot, and it is why the same sequence of drops can play out differently twice.

How to play

• Move the pointer (or drag on a phone) to aim, then click or tap to drop.
• Keyboard also works: arrow keys to move, space to drop.
• Only the five smallest stones are ever dropped; larger ones must be built.
• The next stone is shown in advance so you can plan one move ahead.
• A daily challenge uses a fixed sequence for the day, so everyone playing on the same date gets the same drops.

Scoring

Larger stones are worth more than the two that made them, so depth pays better than breadth. One drop can set off a chain of merges; chains of three or more earn a small score bonus and a noticeably louder reaction.

What you keep

The panel under the board records every tier you have ever made, from Clay up to Sunstone, and ten badges for the things we measured as genuinely hard. Those thresholds came out of 120 simulated rounds played by five bots, not out of a design meeting, and running them changed our minds about two of them: the longest chains in this game usually come from a lucky pile, so a badge for chaining would mostly reward luck. There is also a run of consecutive days, counted on the same clock as the daily board.

Play Pebble Merge Full guide

A flower garden that lasts twelve days

You get twelve plots, twelve days, and three actions a day. Thirty-six decisions. About four minutes. Plant a seed, water it, cut the bloom and sell it, or dig up something you regret and start that plot over, and then dusk comes, the weather rolls in, everything grows a little or dries out a little, and the next morning starts.

Six flowers. From a three-day daisy worth 20 coins to a nine-day sunflower worth 96, and the slow ones pay better per action, at the cost of holding a plot longer and handing the weather more chances to ruin them. That is the trade. A sunflower planted on day nine is worth nothing. A daisy planted on day nine still sells for 20.

Every plot has its own soil: loam, sand or clay. A flower on the ground it likes grows 1.25 times as fast, and on the wrong ground it crawls at 0.70. That gap is the game. Only four of the twelve plots suit the most valuable flower, which means the thing you most want to grow is also the thing you can grow least of, and no amount of careful watering rescues a flower planted in the wrong ground.

How to play

• Click a plot to select it, then plant, water, harvest or dig it up.
• Moisture falls every day. A plant at zero stops growing, and three dry days in a row kills it.
• A bloom sells at full price for two days, then loses 15% a day down to half. Cutting early wastes growth; cutting late wastes money.
• Harvesting several different species pays a bonus, worth up to 290 coins for all six.
• The sidebar lists today's orders: one or two deliveries drawn from the seed, like cut two daisies, or cut one on the soil it likes. They are a nudge towards a plan, and they pay nothing on the board.
• You never have to spend all three actions. Ending the day early is allowed, and is often the right call.

Scoring

Coins earned, plus the variety bonus. We measured this rather than guessed at it, and measuring it caught a real mistake: the first version of the bonus handed every single-flower strategy a free 250 points, because of one character in one line, and we only noticed by running four hundred gardens through a bot. The bonus is now a ladder that starts at two species and climbs steeply from there, worth 10 for two species and 290 for all six.

Across thirty days of real seeds, a bot playing the line we designed for averages 819, and it takes all six species every single time. The best single flower, planted over and over and never mixed, averages 358. Random clicking manages 58. Getting from 358 to 819 is what there is to learn here, and you cannot see how by watching one round, which is the whole reason the board exists.

The daily garden

A new seed goes out at midnight UTC. Everyone playing that day gets the same soil layout and the same twelve days of weather, so the garden you are handed, the rain that falls on day four and the dry spell that lands on day seven are identical for every person who opens the game. Same garden, same rain, same dry spell. A bad score is your gardening rather than your luck. Finish a run and it goes onto a global board for that day.

The board is the same machinery as the one in Pebble Merge. Your browser sends the actions you took, never a score, and our server replays them through the same game code to recompute the result before it counts. Numbers that do not reproduce get thrown out. Cheating means playing better, not editing a number in devtools.

Missing a day costs you the streak, and nothing else. Practice replays any of the last thirty days' gardens, which works because the seed is only the date and yesterday's board is still perfectly reproducible. A practice season goes into your own record and nowhere else: it never touches your streak, and the board will not take it. Play seven days running and you earn a freeze, which waits in the drawer and quietly covers one missed day when it comes.

Play Same Seed