B Blockwood Get Blockwood

Wood block puzzle for iPhone

Nothing falls. Nothing rushes you.

Three wooden pieces at a time on an 8×8 board. Fill a row or a column and it clears. There is no drop timer and no clock, so the only thing deciding how long a game lasts is where you put things.

Download on the App Store

iPhone · free · no ads, no account, works in airplane mode

What you actually get

A hand that always fits

The usual complaint about block puzzles is being handed three pieces that cannot be placed anywhere — losing to the deal rather than to a mistake. That does not happen here. Before a hand is given to you it is checked against the board you actually have, and redrawn if none of the three pieces fits. If twenty redraws somehow fail, the game hands you three single blocks instead. You can still lose, but only after the hand is on the table and you have used part of it.

Rows and columns, colour ignored

A line clears when all eight cells are occupied. That is the whole rule. The seven wood species — oak, maple, walnut, cherry, teak, ash and ebony — are there so you can see the shape of what you placed, not so you can match them. Nothing in the game asks you to sort by colour, which means nothing in the game can punish you for not noticing one.

Combos that compound

Clearing more than one line at once is worth much more than clearing them one at a time — the line score is squared in the number of lines. On top of that, a combo counter rises with every consecutive placement that clears something and multiplies the whole thing, then resets the moment you place a piece that clears nothing. Holding a combo alive is the skill the scoreboard actually rewards.

An energy meter, not a power-up shop

Clears and combos fill an energy bar. At full it can be spent, once, to wipe the entire board — ice included — and your combo survives the wipe. It is not bought, not earned by watching anything, and not gated behind a currency. It is a resource the board itself gave you, and the interesting decision is when to spend it.

Bombs, rainbows and ice

A bomb clears the 3×3 around where it lands, clipped at the edges. A rainbow block is a single cell that fits any gap you have left, which is exactly what you want when the board has gone patchy. Ice blocks take two clears to remove — one clear cracks them, the second takes them away — except when a bomb or a full-board wipe gets them, which does it in one.

Thirty levels with real goals

Levels are not just harder endless runs. Each one sets its own goal — a number of lines, a score, or clearing every ice block on the board — and many come with a preset starting position and a move limit. The early ones teach on an empty board with no special pieces. The last ones hand you a dense field of ice and count your moves. Levels with a move limit award one to three stars depending on how much of the budget you had left.

A daily board everyone shares

The daily challenge is seeded from the local calendar date and generated on the device. Two phones set to the same day produce the same sequence of hands, with nothing downloaded. The home screen shows your result for the day and counts down to the next one.

An engine you could check yourself

Every rule — placement validity, line detection, the bomb blast, ice damage, scoring, combos, energy, the game-over test — lives in pure functions that hold no state and never touch the interface. Randomness comes from a seeded generator, never the system clock mid-game. The result is a game that behaves the same way twice, and 128 unit tests that say so.

How a hand is dealt

The three pieces you get are not drawn blind. This is what happens between one hand being used up and the next appearing.

  1. The hand refills only when it is emptyYou get three pieces and you keep them until all three are placed. There is no conveyor and no replacing a piece you do not like, so the hand is a small planning problem rather than a stream of decisions.
  2. Three shapes are drawn from a weighted setAround forty shapes — bars from one to five cells, 2×2 and 3×3 squares, and the L, T, S and Z families with their rotations — each with its own weight, so the awkward ones stay rare. Special pieces are rolled at low rates on top: bomb, rainbow, ice.
  3. The draw is tested against your boardThe generator asks whether at least one of the three pieces can be placed somewhere on the board as it stands right now. Not the empty board, not a typical board — yours.
  4. If none fits, it draws againUp to twenty times. Almost always the second attempt is fine; the redraw exists for the tight endgame positions where most of the board is full.
  5. If twenty draws fail, you get three single blocksThe smallest possible fallback. A 1×1 fits anywhere there is a single empty cell, so the only board that defeats it is one with no empty cell at all.

So a game ends when the pieces in your hand no longer fit — never when the pieces you were just given never fitted. The difference is the difference between losing and being told you lost.

What leaves your phone

Nothing. The shipped game makes no network requests: there is no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no account system and no backend behind it.

Your best score, which levels you have unlocked, the stars you earned, your result for today’s daily and your settings are kept in the device keychain. They are deleted with the app.

The daily challenge is computed from the date on your phone rather than fetched, which is why it works in airplane mode and why nothing about your play needs to be reported anywhere.

The only outbound links are the privacy policy, the terms and the support address in Settings, and those hand off to Safari or Mail.

Price

Free. All three modes, every level, every special block and every theme are in the app from the first launch.

No ads of any kind — no banner, no interstitial between games, no rewarded video to continue a run. No in-app purchases, no currency, no energy timer, no daily-login reward loop.

Download on the App Store

Questions people ask first

Is there a timer?

No. Nothing falls and nothing counts down. A level can have a move limit, which is a budget rather than a clock — you can think about a move for as long as you want.

Can I undo a move?

No, and that is deliberate. A placement is final, which is what makes the decision before it worth making. There are no hints for the same reason.

Do the colours matter?

Not at all. A line clears when it is full, regardless of which wood the blocks are. The species are there to make the board readable.

Why did my game end when there was still space?

Space is not the test — fit is. The game ends when none of the pieces remaining in your hand can be placed anywhere. Scattered single cells can leave plenty of empty squares and still refuse every shape you are holding.

Do I need an internet connection?

Never, including for the daily challenge, which is generated from the date on the device.