Stones

Every stone is cut, not stamped

Stones is a match-3 game about gems that are actually drawn like gems. Every stone on the board comes out of a fragment shader - six cuts (round brilliant, emerald step, marquise, trillion, hexagon and rhombus) plus a prismatic star, each one faceted, refracting, and shimmering on its own phase.

Thirty moves

A run starts with 30 moves. Every swap spends one - but big play buys them back:

• +1 move for a match of four
• +3 moves for a match of five
• +2 moves for any cascade four links deep

A strong move can leave you better off than you started.

Match four and you get a line stone that blasts its row or column. Match five and you get a prismatic stone that clears every stone of one colour. Cascades multiply the score. If the board ever runs out of legal swaps it reshuffles itself, so a run only ends one way: the move budget.

The Daily Stone

One board a day. The same board for everyone. One attempt at it.

The date is hashed into the seed the run is dealt from, so every player in every timezone is dealt the same stones, the same refills and the same cascades. Your day is spent on the first swap that commits - quitting halfway is not a free re-roll of a board you have already seen.

Consecutive days extend your streak, a gap starts it again, and your best streak is kept either way.

Eight finishes

The looks the board can wear, seven of them earned. A finish is colour and surface: the stone tints, the panel, the cells, the drift behind them, and how the facets catch the light. Some carry a material as well - dispersion, polish, sheen, iridescence, and a slow shimmer on stones at rest.

Obsidian wants a x8 chain. Aurora, Bullion and Nacre want daily streaks of seven, thirty and a hundred days.

A finish never changes the cuts, the facet counts, or a single number a run is scored by. A look that changed play would make one run's score incomparable with another's.

The rest of it

• Two leaderboards - an all-time board for free runs, and a fresh board for every Daily Stone
• Eleven achievements, their art cut from the same shader the board uses
• Steam Cloud saves that merge rather than overwrite, so a run played offline and a run played on another machine both survive
• Mouse and keyboard - drag a stone onto its neighbour, or move the focus ring with the arrows and lift with Space
• Five languages - English, French, Italian, German and Spanish

No currency. No timers. No lives to wait for.

Thirty moves, a board, and whatever you can do with it.