Columns

It is not Tetris: you cycle, you do not rotate

People come to Columns expecting Tetris and get tripped up in the first thirty seconds. The falling piece is always the same shape, a vertical stack of three tiles, and you cannot turn it sideways. What you can do is shuffle the order of the three shades within the stack as it drops. That is the whole control scheme: slide the column left or right, cycle which shade sits where, and let it land. Matches form when three or more of the same shade line up in a row, a column, or a diagonal, and the diagonal is the part newcomers keep forgetting. Half the skill of Columns is simply training your eye to see slanted lines on a board where everything falls straight down.

Stairsteps make diagonals

Since flat rows of three need three separate drops in three neighbouring lanes, the quicker patterns are vertical and diagonal. A vertical match is easy: cycle two matching shades to the bottom of one piece, drop it on a third, done. Diagonals come from stairsteps. Build your stack so neighbouring lanes differ in height by one, like a staircase, then lay the same shade along the step corners. Here is a worked case. Say the left lane is two tiles tall, the middle lane one tile, and the right lane empty, and the top tile of the left lane is dark. Land a piece in the middle with a dark tile on top, then one on the right with dark at the bottom. Those three darks sit on a perfect slant and vanish. Once you see the board as staircases instead of towers, diagonal clears stop being accidents and start being your main source of points, and a stray tile that ruins a step is worth clearing early rather than building around.

Chains are where the points hide

When a match clears, everything above it falls to fill the gap, and if the settled tiles form a fresh line of three, that clears too, and so on. These cascades score far better than single clears, and you can build them on purpose. The simple version: park a pair of one shade directly above where a different match will clear, with the third tile of that pair waiting in the lanes below. Trigger the bottom match, the pair drops, and the second clear fires by itself. Keep the field low and loosely sorted by shade so no colour gets buried, and always leave yourself one calm lane for dumping the piece that fits nowhere. The game speeds up the longer you survive, and a tidy board is the only thing that keeps the fast levels playable. When the drops get quick, change how you make decisions: settle the piece's landing lane the instant it appears, then spend the rest of the fall on cycling the order. Doing it the other way round, fiddling with the order while drifting sideways, is how fast pieces land in the wrong lane with the right shades. Decide the where first, then the what.

• Cycle the three shades before you drop; you cannot lay the piece flat.
• Build stairsteps and lay matching shades along the slant.
• Sort loosely by shade so nothing vital gets buried under junk.
• Set up cascades instead of clearing every match the moment it appears.

Sega's answer to Tetris

Columns started as a side project by Jay Geertsen, a programmer at Hewlett-Packard who wrote the first version in the late 1980s and passed it around the office. Sega picked it up, gave it jewel-themed graphics and an arcade release in 1990, and pushed it hard as its answer to the Tetris craze. It became a signature puzzle game on the Mega Drive, and Sega bundled it with the Game Gear handheld in the West, a direct echo of Nintendo packing Tetris with the Game Boy. The falling-gem, match-in-any-direction idea it spread went on to shape a whole family of puzzle games that came after it. The design has aged well because the choices stay interesting: every piece asks you where it goes and in what order, and the rising speed slowly takes away your thinking time. Play calm, build low, and make the diagonals work for you.