The history of Blocks

Fitting shapes into a grid is one of the oldest puzzles there is. The version on this site brings together three ideas from three different centuries: polyomino shapes, clearing full lines, and the boxes of a Sudoku grid.

Shapes made of squares

Puzzles about cutting and fitting squares go back at least to the English puzzle writer Henry Dudeney, whose 1907 book The Canterbury Puzzles included a broken chessboard to be put back together from pieces made of joined squares — twelve of them shapes of five squares each.

The shapes got their name in 1953, when the American mathematician Solomon Golomb gave a talk at Harvard and called them polyominoes: dominoes, but with any number of squares. His 1965 book Polyominoes and Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American made them famous among puzzle lovers. There's exactly one way to join one square, one for two, two for three, five for four (allowing turns and flips) and twelve for five.

Clearing lines

In 1984, a falling-blocks game written on a Soviet computer added the idea that changed everything: fill a row completely and it disappears. Suddenly fitting shapes wasn't a puzzle with an end; it was a game you could play forever, as long as you kept up. It became one of the best-selling video games of all time.

That game was about speed. The pieces fell, and if you were too slow, you lost. A lot of people loved the shapes and the clearing but not the panic.

Turn-based, on a phone

In the 2010s, mobile games took the falling out. You were given a few pieces at a time to drop wherever you liked on a square grid, with no clock at all, and full rows and columns cleared. Without the time pressure it became a thinking game, and one that suited a phone held in one hand during a commute.

Later versions shrank the board to 9×9 and borrowed the 3×3 boxes of Sudoku, so that a full box clears too. That's the version you'll find here. The boxes add a third way to clear and make the board feel much less like a pile of rows, because a single well-placed piece can finish a row, a column and a box at once.

Our take

Blocks on this site keeps the calm, turn-based style, with a few choices of our own. Pieces never rotate, so every decision is visible in the tray. The pieces come from a shuffled bag that contains every shape, so a run is never decided by a drought of one shape. And the daily run gives everyone the same pieces in the same order, so a score is something you can compare with a friend.