Tideglass
Match sea glass to fill the glass. You can see what's coming.
A match-3 tug-of-war against the tide. The glass starts empty. Every match you make pours water in, every swap pulls some back out, and that pull gets deeper the longer a round runs. The water also seeps away slowly while you think, though it can never seep past empty. Fill the glass to the brim and you've won the day. Let a swap pull it dry and you've lost it. None of this is luck: the strip above the board shows what each column gets next, so the cascades you ride are the ones you planned.
How to play
- Swap two neighbors to line up three or more shards of a kind. Swaps must make a match, so no move is ever wasted.
- The waterline is the game. Every swap pulls it down a step, and that pull deepens as the round goes on. Every match pours it back up. While you think, the water seeps out slowly, but the seep on its own can never end a round. Reach the brim to win. Let a swap pull the glass dry and it's over.
- Match four to forge a charged current. When any clear takes it, it sweeps its entire line, and every cell it crosses scores. Score is water.
- Match five, or make a cross, to forge a moonstone. It arrives dormant. Swap it into a shard to use it: that wipes every shard of that color and awakens your other moonstones into wildcards, which complete any line already holding two of a kind.
- The preview strip above the board shows each column's next shard. Refills are decided in advance, so plan with them.
- One tide a day counts. The daily board is the same for everyone and feeds your streak. After that, free play becomes the endless tide: every glass you brim spills into a new one with a deeper pull, and it keeps going until the pool finally runs dry. Unlimited, and nothing is recorded.
Your statistics
One tide a day
One tide a day, the same board and the same incoming shards for everyone. Your first attempt is the one that counts. Brim the glass and your streak grows, and either way your score goes on the day's leaderboard, because a high-water drowning still beats everyone who scored less.
After that the play button deals the endless tide: random boards, each brimmed glass spilling into a deeper one. Nothing there is recorded, which makes it the right place to work out the moonstone economy. That takes a few runs to click.
A match 3 game without luck
In most match-3 games the refill is a slot machine. You make a move, and the game decides at random whether to reward it. Tideglass keeps the refill and throws out the randomness. Each column's incoming shards are fixed the moment the board is dealt, and the next one always sits in the strip above the board. Two players making the same swaps see the same cascades, every time. A good result is earned rather than dealt, and a plan that accounts for what's falling next is an actual plan.
There's no countdown either. Losing is something a swap does, never something the clock does. Thinking has a price but not a penalty: the water seeps gently while you sit there, so it's worth carrying a plan out briskly, but the seep can never drown you on its own. Efficiency first, tempo second. That's the order the leaderboard rewards.
Currents and moonstones
Currents come from matching four. They keep their color and carry a charge, and when any clear takes one it sweeps the entire line running perpendicular to the run that forged it. Every cell it crosses scores, and score is water.
Moonstones come from matching five, or from an L- or T-shaped cross, and they live two lives. Freshly forged, a moonstone is dormant: a pale sleeping pearl that matches nothing. Swap one directly into a shard to use it, and two things happen at once. Every shard of that color leaves the board, and every other moonstone wakes, turning iridescent and acting as a wildcard through the cascades that follow.
The wake is a moment, not a state. Any wildcard that finds no match before the board settles dissolves into the water. So put your stones where the wake will find them work. A well-timed activation cashes the whole bank at once.
How scoring works
Every cleared shard scores, and each cascade step multiplies, so shards cleared by the third chained set are worth triple. Forging and firing specials pays too. Score does double duty here: it's your leaderboard entry and it's the water keeping you alive, which makes a deep engineered cascade both the flashiest and the most practical thing you can do.
There's a ceiling on the pour per swap, though, so one monster cascade can't brim the glass by itself. And as the pull deepens, small tidy matches stop being enough. The endgame belongs to whoever banked specials for the deep water.
A few things worth knowing
- Read the preview strip before every swap. A match that looks good now can set up a dead board, and a worse-looking match can chain into what's falling.
- Don't panic-match when the water is high. Use the calm to forge specials, and spend them once it drops.
- Dormant moonstones do nothing, and awakened ones dissolve if they find no match. Place your stones where the wake will find them lines, then spend one.
- The activation wipe reshuffles half the board. Stones sitting near the wiped color are most likely to land in fresh matches when everything falls.
- Cascades outscore anything you can do by hand. Engineer them; don't stumble into them.
Streaks and the daily archive
Brim the daily glass on consecutive days and you build a streak. Miss a day and it resets. Every past daily lives in the archive with the same board, refill order and tide pull that shipped that day, free to replay without touching your record. Since nothing about a board is random, an archive replay really is a second attempt at the same tide.