🟦 Brick Stack

The well, the pieces and the shuffle

Brick Stack is played in a well 10 cells wide and 20 tall. Every piece is a tetromino, four squares joined edge to edge, and there are exactly seven of them: the long I, the square O, the T, the S and Z zigzags, and the J and L hooks. Each new piece appears near the top centre, and the Next box shows you the one after it. There is no hold slot, so the Next box is all the planning help you get.

Pieces are not drawn completely at random. The game shuffles all seven shapes into a bag, deals them out one by one, then shuffles a fresh bag. That means every run of seven pieces contains each shape exactly once. You will never see three S pieces in a row, and the longest possible wait between two long bars is 12 pieces (an I at the start of one bag, then an I at the very end of the next).

Scoring, with the real numbers

Line clears pay a base value multiplied by your current level: 100 for one line, 300 for two, 500 for three and 800 for four. Per line that works out to 100, 150, about 167 and 200, so bigger clears are always worth more per row. There are no combo, spin or back-to-back bonuses here; the size of each clear and the level are the whole story.

Dropping also pays. Soft drop (down arrow, S, swipe down or the down button) adds 1 point per row the piece falls. Hard drop (Space or a fast swipe) slams it to the ghost outline and adds 2 points per row. On an empty board a hard drop from the top is worth up to about 38 points.

Worked example: you are on level 3 and hard drop a long bar 15 rows into the slot you kept open, clearing four lines. The drop pays 30, the clear pays 800 times 3, or 2,400. The same four lines taken as four separate singles at level 3 would have paid 1,200.

How the speed actually climbs

Your level is 1 plus the number of lines cleared divided by 10, rounded down, so level 2 arrives at 10 lines, level 5 at 40 and level 10 at 90. Because points are multiplied by level, a four-line clear at level 8 pays 6,400, eight times what it pays at the start.

Gravity starts at one row per second and gets 85 milliseconds faster per level: 915 ms at level 2, 575 ms at level 6, 235 ms at level 10 and 150 ms at level 11. From level 12 (110 lines) it hits the floor of 80 ms per row and stays there. The game has no last level; it runs until the stack tops out.

One detail matters more than anything else at speed: there is no lock delay. When a piece is resting on the stack, it locks on the next gravity tick, and sliding or rotating does not reset that clock. At level 12 you have roughly a twelfth of a second after touchdown. Line the piece up while it is still falling, then commit.

Rotation quirks worth knowing

Every rotation is clockwise. There is no counterclockwise button, so turning a piece one step left takes three presses. Know which of your pieces need that, and start turning them the moment they appear.

If a rotation would push the piece into a wall or another block, the game tries nudging it one cell left, one cell right, then two cells left and two cells right, and uses the first spot that fits. It never nudges upward. So a piece wedged deep in a narrow gap often cannot rotate at all, and a long bar standing upright beside the wall can shift sideways by up to two cells when you turn it.

Beginner mistakes that end runs

Most short games die the same five ways. Fix these and your average run gets a lot longer.

• Building a tower in the middle. Pieces spawn in the centre columns, so a tall middle is what reaches the top first. Keep the centre lowest if anything.
• Leaving covered holes. A gap with a block over it cannot be filled until you clear every row above it. One hole can cost you three or four rows of good stacking.
• Waiting for the long bar with no backup. It can be up to 12 pieces away. If your open column is deeper than four rows, a J, L or upright I can still take a smaller clear.
• Tapping rotate four times to check a fit. Use the ghost outline at the bottom instead: it shows exactly where the current rotation will land.
• Holding soft drop to farm points. One extra point per row is not worth losing the time you need to line the piece up.

Stacking like a pro

Aim for a surface where neighbouring columns differ by one cell at most. A bumpy stack with steps of two or three cells only accepts a couple of specific pieces; a flat one accepts almost anything. S and Z are the pieces that punish a messy surface most, so leave a one-step ledge for them wherever you can.

Count in bags. Seven pieces fill 28 cells, a little under three rows of a 10-wide well, and one four-line clear needs 36 cells beside the open column. So you are building for about nine or ten pieces per long bar, and the bag makes sure one is coming within that window more often than not.

Read the Next box as your real decision. If the next piece is an O, keep a flat two-wide spot for it. If it is the I and your well is four deep, place the current piece anywhere that keeps the well clean. Planning one piece ahead is what separates level 6 from level 12.

Brick Stack FAQ