Two minutes of reading, then never again.
On a phone: drag anywhere on your board to aim — the ball doesn't fire when you lift your thumb. Tap to fire. On a keyboard: move the mouse to aim and click, or use the keys shown under the board.
The three small balls at the bottom are what's loading next. Plan two ahead and you'll stop wasting shots.
Three touching balls of one colour pop. That's the floor, not the goal.
The real damage is gravity. Anything left hanging with nothing above it falls off the board — and falling balls are worth triple. So don't shoot at the cluster you want gone; shoot at the balls holding it up.
Every so often the ceiling delivers a marble that doesn't play by the colour rules. You'll spot them straight away — a dark face with a pulsing ring.
The cyan one with the arrows takes out its entire row. It's the common one, roughly one every few ceiling rows.
The amber one with the spark is a bomb. Rare, and it takes out everything within two marbles of itself.
You don't shoot them — they sit in the stack and you set them off by landing a shot against one. The marble you fired is spent doing it. And if a blast catches another special, that one goes off too: chain a bomb into a row-clearer and the board falls apart.
Whatever they take out counts as yours — points, and in a duel, garbage on your opponent.
Take the last ball off the board and you bank a big bonus and a fresh, deeper board drops in. In a duel it also dumps a load of garbage on your opponent — it's the hardest hit in the game. In Score Attack it's worth a free level.
Every 30 balls you clear puts you up a level, and every level makes the game worse for you in two ways: the ceiling creeps down sooner — every six shots at Level 1, every two by Level 9 — and new colours join the board. You start on four colours and end on seven.
The ceiling also comes down on a clock, not just on your shots — whichever runs out first. It's a slow clock, about four and a half seconds per shot's worth, so playing at any normal pace you'll always hit the shot count long before the timer. It's there so that stopping doesn't stop the game. The thin line along the top rail shows how close the next row is; it turns amber just before it lands.
The colours are the real killer. More colours means matching clusters are rarer, so you clear less per shot while the ceiling comes faster. Points scale with the level too, so surviving high is worth far more than playing safe low.
There's no winning it. The run ends when the board reaches your gun — the only question is what level you got to.
In a duel, everything you clear lands on your opponent — stuck to the underside of their stack, growing it down toward their gun. You get a short warning before it arrives: clear something in that window and you cancel part of it. Never all of it, though. Half of every clear always gets through.
Let the stack reach your gun line and you're buried.
Now and then your own cannon loads a molten one — you'll see it glowing two shots out in the reload queue, so you can save it for the worst part of the board.
It doesn't stick and it doesn't care about colour. Wherever it lands it burns the marble it hits and everything around it. Land it on a bomb and you get both.
On the menu you set how long a duel runs — no limit, or one to five minutes — and whether you're playing a single game, best of 3, or best of 5. If nobody's buried when the clock runs out, the higher score wins. It goes red and starts ticking with fifteen seconds left, which is when a lead becomes worth defending and a deficit becomes worth gambling a drop on.
In a series the result card keeps the score and the button becomes Next game until someone has enough wins. Online, the room uses whatever the first player into it picked, so you can't start a match with the two sides disagreeing about the rules.
Score Attack ignores all of that. It has no clock and it ends when the ceiling wins — and it always eventually does.
Watch the badge next to the mode name in the top bar: that's your level.
Online only works on the real game address — not on a preview copy. If Play a Friend looks greyed out, you're on a preview; open the shared link instead.
Best on a laptop, or a phone turned sideways. Left player: A / D to aim, W to fire. Right player: ← / → to aim, ↑ to fire.