Peak Load — Rules & Strategy

A falling-block puzzle with a power plant bolted on. Completed lines do not clear themselves — they stay on the board glowing gold, charged, and you decide when they go.

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The one-line version

This is not a game about clearing many lines. It is a game about clearing them at the right moment. Stacking well is how you make ammunition; the score comes from when you pull the trigger.

Core rules

1. The board is completely standard. 10×20, 7-bag, SRS rotation with wall kicks, one hold slot, five NEXT previews, ghost piece. Nothing about the stacking layer is new.
2. Completed lines charge instead of clearing. There is no auto-clear. A finished line glows gold and stays exactly where it is.
3. Firing is your move. Press Enter (or the ⚡ FIRE button) and every charged line goes at once, spiking output: 1 line +34, 2 lines +62, 3 lines +88, 4 lines +120 MW.
4. Output always cools. It halves every 5.5 seconds. Do nothing and it keeps sliding down. The ceiling is 140 MW.
5. Hold it inside the band. The green ribbon on the graph is 85–130% of demand. Inside it you score 12 points per second and both gauges recover.
6. Blackout or overheat — either one at 100 ends the run. Leak below the band and blackout climbs; spill above and overheat does, both in proportion to how far out you are.
7. Auto-fire at five. When charge reaches a fifth line the plant fires by itself so the board cannot lock up. That is the moment you lose control of the timing, so try never to reach it.

The battery — your permit for a four-line fire

A vertical bar beside the board holds 0–60 units. Surplus above the band's top edge (130% of demand) goes into the battery before any gauge moves, at up to 18 per second. Only once the battery is full does overheat start climbing. On the other side, a shortfall pulls up to 22 per second back out to hold the grid up. The battery starts every round at zero.

The catch: the battery keeps you alive but never pays you. Stable-time points and gauge recovery only happen when you are genuinely inside the band, not when the battery is quietly covering for you. The screen border tells you which is which — green for real stability, cyan for "the battery is absorbing this", deep blue for shortfall, red glow for overheat.

How the three minutes are shaped

A round is 180 seconds in three phases. Morning (0–60s) sits around 44–66 MW with a small swing — the learning stretch. Day (60–120s) climbs and brings two spikes; this is where the battery starts earning its place. Peak (120–180s) swings hard with four spikes and demands instant reactions.

Worth understanding: "gentle" here means less variation, not lower demand. The band is 45% of demand wide, so a low demand makes the band narrow in absolute MW and therefore harder to sit inside. That is why morning demand is not tiny — it is steady.

Survive 180 seconds and you clear. The clear screen offers Overtime, which carries your board, gauges and score straight through and runs forever, with demand swinging wider and faster as it goes.

Scoring and grades

Stable time pays 12 per second. The on-time bonus pays +150 per line when output lands inside the band within one second of firing. Against that, a waste penalty applies when, within three seconds of a fire, surplus the battery could not absorb actually pushed the overheat gauge up — scaled to how much was wasted (×12, capped at −80 per fire). Soft and hard drops score nothing at all: the scoring is telling you, in points, that stacking fast is not the objective. Grade cuts are S 5600 / A 4500 / B 3000, C below that.

Strategy

1. The gold dashed curve is your sight

Whenever anything is charged, a gold dashed line appears over the demand graph. It is literally "here is where output goes if you fire now, and here is how it cools". Drawn alongside it: the green band ribbon, the demand line, your last 12 seconds of output, and the decay curve if you do nothing. Fire when the dashed curve lands on the green ribbon. Without reading it, this game is guesswork.

2. The right 12 seconds is a forecast — fire into the top of a spike

The graph window is 12 seconds of history plus 12 seconds of forecast. When you see a spike rising, do not fire yet — hold the charge and release at the peak. Higher demand means a wider band in absolute terms, so the same four-line fire that overheats you in a trough becomes a ×4 on-time bonus at the top of a spike. Almost all of the big scoring in the peak phase comes from this.

3. Read the battery bar to choose how many lines to fire

A four-line fire is +120 MW. Into low demand that is an instant overheat — unless the battery is empty and can swallow the surplus (18/s, capacity 60). Battery level is effectively your permit slip. The corollary matters just as much: a full battery has no headroom left, so the same fire that was safe a minute ago is now dangerous. A battery that cycles up and down is a healthy one; a battery pinned at full is a warning.

4. The penalty is for waste, not for firing

Output briefly overshooting the band right after a fire is normal and costs you nothing. The penalty scales with how much surplus actually pushed the overheat gauge up after the battery took its share. So "slightly over the ribbon" and "dumped a whole fire into nothing" are priced differently — overshooting a little while chasing the on-time bonus is usually still profitable.

5. Use the 25-second warm-up to build a full magazine

Blackout cannot accumulate until your first fire, or 25 seconds, whichever comes first. So there is no reason to rush out a single line early. Stack two or three charged lines calmly and land them on the band exactly as warm-up ends. Two caveats: overheat is live during warm-up, and stable-time points do not accrue while you sit idle — so burning the full 25 seconds doing nothing is its own loss.

6. Stop at four charged lines and fire on your own terms

Reaching a fifth charged line triggers auto-fire, which hands the timing to the game: the on-time bonus and the waste penalty both become luck. Worse, blocks collapsing after a fire can overlap your active piece, which then has to be pushed up or respawned. Cap yourself at four and fire before the fifth line completes — that is the line between playing the game and being played by it.

FAQ

Do I need an account?

No. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Best scores and settings live in your browser only and are never sent to a server.

Is everyone playing the same board?

In Daily Demand mode, yes — the demand curve, the spikes and the piece order all come deterministically from the date. Free mode is random every run.

I completed a line and nothing happened. Is that a bug?

No, that is the game. Completed lines stay charged in gold until you press Enter or ⚡. At five charged lines the plant fires automatically.

Are the controls standard?

Yes. SRS with wall kicks, 7-bag, hold, ghost and DAS auto-repeat are all the ones you already know. The only new input is Enter to fire.

Does the blackout gauge fill before I can do anything?

No. Until your first fire or 25 seconds, whichever comes first, you are in warm-up and blackout cannot accumulate. A badge above the graph counts the seconds down and the board border turns amber. Overheat still applies.

Does stacking faster score more?

No — soft and hard drops are worth zero. Points come only from stable time and the on-time bonus.

Is three minutes the whole game?

180 seconds clears the round; Overtime then carries board, gauges and score forward indefinitely as demand swings grow.

Can I read the state without watching the numbers?

Yes — the screen border is the readout. Green: inside the band. Cyan: the battery is absorbing. Deep blue with a vignette: output is short. Red glow: overheating.

Controls

Desktop: ←→ move · ↑ or X rotate · Z counter-rotate · ↓ soft drop · Space hard drop · Shift/C hold · Enter fire · P pause.
Mobile: swipe sideways to move, down to soft drop, up to hard drop, tap to rotate. A button row under the board and the ⚡ FIRE button are always available too.

Other guides

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