Stack Purge
Tap matching groups before the rising stack reaches the top.
How to Play Stack Purge
- Find two or more touching blocks that share a colour and pip count.
- Tap the group to purge it — the blocks above collapse down into the gap.
- Bigger groups score more and buy more time. Let the stack reach the top line and the run ends.
Controls
| Keyboard | Not required |
|---|---|
| Touch | Tap a group of two or more matching blocks |
Tips
- Purge low, not high. Clearing near the floor drops the whole column and buys you room.
About Stack Purge
Rows of blocks push up from below. Tap two or more touching blocks that match and the stack collapses into the gap. Every purge buys time. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Stack Purge was built
Scoring is n * (n - 1) * mult, which is quadratic in group size. Clearing two blocks twice is worth two points; clearing four at once is worth twelve. Every frame you spend looking for a bigger group is paid for by the formula, and that is the only thing pushing a player to plan rather than tap.
The five colours carry a pip count from one to five, dice-style, baked into each block. Colour is the fast read and the pips are the one that works for a player who cannot rely on hue — the same rule applied across this catalogue after an earlier game encoded a do-not-touch state in colour alone.
Two performance details worth stealing. Group detection is a flood fill over a pre-allocated stack rather than recursion, which avoids both call-depth risk and an allocation per tap on a ninety-six cell grid. And the particle count per cleared block drops from eight to four once a group exceeds eight blocks — without that, one big satisfying clear exhausts the shared 220-slot effects pool and the next several clears produce no particles at all, which reads to the player as the game losing interest exactly when they did something good.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which blocks match?
Colour and the pip pattern both have to match, so you can still play it if you do not see colour well.
Do bigger groups score more?
Yes, and they buy more time too. A group of six is worth far more than three groups of two.
What ends a run in Stack Purge?
The stack reaching the top line, or the clock running out. The stack is what usually gets you.
Browse every game on Neon Arcade · read the dev notes behind them