Seven shapes.
Last well standing.

The falling-blocks game, with the two things that make it a game rather than a toy: a level curve that will eventually beat you, and a versus mode where every row you clear lands in somebody else’s well.

Play it now ▸ — solo against the machine for the highscore board, or 1 on 1 with somebody on the network.

Where the shapes came from

Tetris was written by Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow in 1984, on an Electronika 60 with no graphics — the first version drew its pieces out of bracket characters. The seven shapes are the seven distinct ways four squares can be joined edge to edge, which is where the name comes from, and the fact that the set is complete rather than designed is a large part of why the game has never needed a sequel.

The competitive form came later. Modern play is built on the bag randomiser — the seven pieces are dealt in a shuffled set of seven, so you never get four S-pieces in a row and never wait forever for the I — and on garbage: rows you clear rise up under your opponent. Both are here.

How to play

1. Pieces fall into the well. Rotate them and slide them so they fill complete rows; a complete row clears and everything above it drops.
2. Clearing more rows at once is worth disproportionately more, and clearing four with the long piece — a tetris — is worth the most. Chaining them back to back is worth more again.
3. Every ten lines the level goes up and the pieces fall faster. There is no score limit and no ending: the run lasts until the well reaches the ceiling.
4. In a versus game, the rows you clear appear as garbage at the bottom of the other player’s well, pushing their stack up. Both players get the same pieces in the same order from one shared seed, so nobody can be dealt a worse game than anybody else.

Playing it well

Keep the stack flat and keep one column open for the long piece. Almost every beginner’s run ends the same way — a jagged surface with a one-wide hole three rows down that nothing can reach — and almost every improvement is about not creating that hole in the first place.

Use the hold slot and read the preview. The pieces are dealt in bags of seven, which means the sequence is genuinely predictable in the short term: if you have seen five of the bag, you know what the remaining two must be.

In versus, timing matters more than volume. Sending four small clears gives the other player four chances to dig out; sending one large one, or a back-to-back chain, arrives faster than they can clear it.

Questions

The rest of the arcade

Pong, Chess, Oware, Draughts and Snake. All of them play the same two ways: against a machine or against a person.