Pills

Think in rows, place with rotation

Pills is a falling-capsule puzzle in the Dr. Mario mould, and the one skill that separates a cleared bottle from a jammed one is planning your rotation before the capsule lands. Each capsule has two colored halves. Move it left and right, rotate with Up (or Z and X), and press Down to drop it faster. Because the two halves can point in any of four directions, you can lay a capsule flat to bridge two columns or stand it upright to build a single stack. The half-second while it's still high in the bottle is your planning window: decide the column, decide the orientation, then use the fast drop. Fast-dropping before you've decided is how stacks go wrong.

Clearing the germs

Germs come in three tones, and each also carries a symbol (a ring, a plus, or a square), so you can tell them apart at a glance instead of squinting at shades. You clear a germ by lining up four or more matching cells in a row or column, and capsule halves count toward that line exactly like germs do. The tidy approach is to stack matching colors directly above or beside a germ so one well-placed capsule triggers the clear. Higher levels pack in more germs, some buried under others, and buried ones can only be reached from above. Work each pile from the top down: capsules spent poking at a covered germ just raise the stack.

Guard the neck

The danger is the neck of the bottle. Every capsule enters there, so if junk piles up under the neck with no plan to remove it, the next capsule has nowhere to go and it's game over. Keep the center columns lower than the sides, and don't strand a single off-color half in the middle of a stack where it blocks future matches. When the center does start rising, stop building elsewhere and spend two or three capsules digging it back down, even if those placements feel wasted. A wasted capsule costs you a little. A jammed neck costs you the level.

A concrete rescue: say the center column has climbed within three rows of the neck, topped by a stray square half. Match it instead of building around it. Bring the next capsule in upright with a square half on the bottom, and the one after too, until the column of four clears and the whole pile drops a step. Two clears like that buy you the room to get back to the actual germs.

Worked clears and chains

Here's the bread-and-butter play. A ring germ sits at the bottom of an open column. Stand a capsule with two ring halves upright on top of it: that's three in a column, and any later capsule with even one ring half finishes the four. Mixed capsules, the ones with two different tones, want flat ground instead: lay one along the floor where each half sits over its own color project, or park it at the far edge where it can't poison a stack.

Chains are the same idea with gravity doing the second move. When a clear removes cells, whatever sat on top falls. Suppose you clear four rings standing in a column, and riding above that stack was a stray plus half. It drops. If two plus halves and a plus germ already wait in the row where it lands, the fall completes a second four and the board clears itself while you watch. You don't need to engineer these on purpose every time. Just make a habit of stacking spare halves above their own color, and chains start happening on their own.

Where the format comes from

This traces back to Dr. Mario, Nintendo's 1990 falling-capsule game for the NES and Game Boy, produced under Gunpei Yokoi, the designer behind the Game Boy itself. It arrived in the wave of falling-block puzzles that followed Tetris but bent the formula: instead of clearing endless lines, you get a bottle of fixed targets and you're judged on surgical placement. Its two songs, Fever and Chill, by Nintendo composer Hirokazu Tanaka, became nearly as famous as the game. Pills keeps the skeleton (three germ tones, two-half capsules, four in a line to clear) and adds the symbol markings, so the tones stay readable even in plain black and white.