Pixel Arcade
About this game
Blob Chain is a colour-matching drop puzzle. Pairs of coloured blobs fall into a six-wide well and you rotate and place them; any group of four or more of the same colour that are touching pops and disappears.
The controls are left and right to move, up or X to rotate the pair, and down to speed the drop, with the same layout mapped to the touch pad. Because a pair can be rotated into a vertical or horizontal orientation, and because the two halves separate when they land on uneven ground, placement here is fiddlier and more expressive than in a line-clearing game.
The whole scoring system is built on chains. Popping a single group of four is worth very little. But when a group pops, everything above it falls, and if that fall completes another group, the second pop scores with a multiplier — and a third pop multiplies again. A well-built five-step chain can score more than an entire game of single pops, so experienced players deliberately bury a trigger colour at the bottom of a tall stack.
The practical advice for a first session: keep one column low as a staircase, group colours in vertical columns of three rather than scattered pairs, and resist popping anything until you have at least a two-step reaction set up. Colour-group droppers emerged in the early 1990s as the main alternative to line-clearing wells.
FAQ
What is a chain?
A pop that causes a second pop after gravity settles. Chains multiply your score enormously, so a four-step chain is worth far more than four separate pops.
How do I build one?
Stack a group of three, place a fourth colour on top of it, then pop the group underneath so the top group falls into a match.
Is it like a falling-block game?
The pieces fall the same way, but you are matching groups by colour, not filling lines, so the stack is deliberately uneven.
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