Chroma Drop — Rules & Strategy

A falling-block puzzle with wet paint on top. Filling a row does not clear it — the whole row has to be one colour, and that colour has to be the current target.

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The one-line version

This is not a game about how you fill a row. It is a game about what colour you fill it with. The habit every falling-block puzzle teaches you — stack flat, leave no gaps — comes straight back at you here as a dead row.

Core rules

1. Every piece is a single primary. Red ●, blue ▲ or yellow ■, never anything else. The board is 6 columns by 14 rows, and the top two rows are a spawn buffer: lock a piece inside them and the run is over.
2. Paint bleeds on lock, downward, once. The moment a piece locks, only the cells along its bottom edge mix with the cell directly beneath. Red+blue=purple ◆, blue+yellow=green ✦, red+yellow=orange ★. If another cell of the same piece is directly below, that cell is occluded and nothing happens.
3. Mixed colours never mix again. Drop red onto purple and nothing at all happens. No chains means the board stays calculable — and it is also exactly what creates dead rows.
4. Clearing needs all three conditions. Full + every cell the same colour + that colour is the current target. Miss one and the row simply stays.
5. Reserved rows. A full single-colour row glows in its own colour. It pops the instant the target becomes that colour — the clear check runs on target changes too, not just on lock.
6. The target is a queue of three. You see the current target plus the next two. The queue advances in exactly three ways: a clear, a reroll, or automatically every 4 locked pieces if nothing has cleared (watch the ⏳ counter in the HUD).

Dead rows — learn this first

Because mixed colours never mix again, every filled cell already has a fixed set of colours it can still become. An empty cell can become anything. A red cell can only ever be red, purple or orange. Blue: blue, purple or green. Yellow: yellow, green or orange. And a mixed cell is stuck as itself forever.

The moment those sets across a row have nothing in common, that row can never be a single colour again. Purple and orange sharing a row is the classic case, and red, blue and yellow all appearing in one row kills it just as dead. The game tells you: the row desaturates, a semi-transparent hatch band goes over it, and a ⚠ badge appears at its left edge. The hatch is deliberately see-through, because you still need to read the colours underneath to decide which cell to bleach.

Ink, bleach and reroll — three currencies

Ink runs 0–8 and starts at 5. Press C (or 🎨) to cycle the falling piece to the next primary for 1 ink. It refills +1 for every 3 pieces you lock and +2 per cleared line. Note what the refill is keyed to: locked pieces, not the clock. Playing fast or slow gets you ink at the same rate.

Bleach costs 2 ink (X or 🧴) and turns the current piece into a bleach piece. On lock it overwrites the cell below with its own colour instead of mixing. Occlusion and the no-chains rule are unchanged, so it still only touches the bottom edge. One per piece, and the bleached state follows the piece into hold. The piece is drawn with a white outline and a wave mark; on the ghost, cells about to be overwritten get a white double outline so you never confuse them with a bleed preview.

Reroll (R or 🔄) starts at 4 and caps at 4. It redraws the current target from outside the queue — never the same colour again — and you earn +1 for every 2 lines cleared. Rerolling also resets the ⏳ auto-advance counter. Targets are drawn 45% primary / 55% mixed, and any colour you already have reserved on the board is weighted 2× within its group.

Scoring and grades

A primary line is 100, a mixed line is 250. Doubles multiply by 2.2, triples by 4. Combos add a cumulative +50 per consecutive clear, and any line cleared without spending a single point of ink pays +80 on top. Soft drop is +1 per row, hard drop +2. Level rises every 5 lines and gravity tightens to max(120, 800 − level×55)ms. Grade cuts are S 4000 / A 2200 / B 1100 / C 450, and the result card records lines cleared, mixed lines, best combo and bleaches used.

Strategy

1. Read the bleed markers on the ghost before you commit

The drop shadow already shows which cells will bleed and into what colour, drawn as a mixed-colour ring with its glyph. Skip it and the whole game turns into guesswork. Mixing is irreversible — a cell that turns purple is purple forever — so this one habit prevents most dead rows before they exist.

2. "Stack flat" is a bad habit here

In an ordinary falling-block puzzle any colour fills a row, so flat stacking wins. Here a row filled with whatever came next tends to end up holding all three primaries, which kills it. Pushing one row toward one colour beats spreading colours across several rows almost every time — and on a 6-wide board a single 4-cell I piece already covers two thirds of a row in one colour.

3. Mixed lines pay 2.5×, and they never happen by accident

Mixed colours can only be created by bleeding. To build a six-cell mixed row you have to lay down one row in one primary and then cover it with a different primary, converting two rows in a single lock. That is a plan two or more pieces deep, which is exactly why it is worth 250 instead of 100. Nobody stumbles into one.

4. Bank reserved rows, then reroll them all at once

Two or three full rows in the same colour turn a single target match into a multi-clear multiplier (×2.2 for two, ×4 for three). Better still, reserved colours are weighted 2× in the target draw, so stacking them also raises the odds the target comes to you for free. When one reroll flips an entire run, this is the board state it flipped.

5. Treat the ⏳ counter as a timetable, not a threat

The target moves on by itself every 4 locked pieces. Read that as pressure and you rush your placements; read it correctly and it is a schedule telling you exactly when the next colour arrives. Look at the second and third chips in the queue and start building those rows now. That is the intended way to play.

6. Bleach is a last resort, not insurance

Bleach only reaches the surface of the stack, so a dead row buried under later pieces is gone for good. The two moments it earns its 2 ink are: a dead row that is still exposed, and a row the ghost preview shows is about to die, where overwriting one cell breaks the collision. "I'll bleach it later" almost always means you won't.

FAQ

Do I need an account?

No. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Scores, best runs and your language choice live in your browser only and are never sent to a server.

Does the puzzle change every day?

Daily Palette is derived deterministically from the date, so everyone playing on a given day gets the same pieces in the same colours. Piece randomness and target randomness run on separate streams, so however often you reroll, the piece order never shifts. Free mode is random every run.

My row is full. Why did it not clear?

All three conditions have to hold at once: full, one colour, and that colour is the current target. If the colour is uniform but the target is elsewhere, the row is reserved — its border glows and it pops the instant the target comes around.

What is the row with grey hatching over it?

A dead row. Two different mixed colours, or all three primaries, in one row means it can never become uniform again. Bleach is the only way back.

When is bleach worth 2 ink?

2 ink is deliberately expensive — it is a stronger effect than recolouring, since it overwrites unconditionally. The cost exists so that "is this row worth saving?" is a real decision rather than a reflex.

I am colour blind. Can I play?

Yes. Every cell always carries a unique glyph alongside its colour (● ▲ ■ ◆ ✦ ★), including the target chip, the NEXT queue and the result card. Dead rows are signalled by texture and a ⚠ badge, not by colour.

Does it work on a phone?

It was built portrait-first. A fixed button row sits under the board (◀ ⟳ ▶ 🎨 🧴 ⤓) and the board takes gestures as well: tap to rotate, swipe sideways to move, swipe down to soft drop. Hold and reroll are tiles in the side tray.

Does sharing my result spoil anything?

No. The share card is an emoji grid of the bottom 8 rows of your final board plus your score — it never contains the piece or colour sequence.

Controls

Desktop: ←→ move · ↑ rotate · ↓ soft drop · Space hard drop · C recolour · X bleach · Shift hold · R reroll · P pause. Hold is once per piece.

Other guides

• Peak Load — rules and strategy · completed lines don't clear themselves; you fire them to match demand
• Magnet Break — rules and strategy · breakout with a paddle that never moves — you bend the ball with magnets
• Murder Grid — rules and strategy · a daily deduction puzzle where sudoku buys your clues
• About playbuns · design principles, how the games are built, our advertising rules

This page is updated whenever the rules change. If you spot an error, tell us through contact.