BrickShooter: A Tile Matching Game with a Twist

Like many tile matching games, your goal is to remove tiles from a board by matching three or more like tiles. What makes BrickShooter unique is the way you add tiles to the playing area - You shoot them from the sidelines.

The main board is a 10 x 10 grid. At the start of each game one tile of each pattern in play is placed near the center of the grid. Three additional random tiles are placed adjacent to each square on the border of the grid on all four sides. The tile closest to the grid can be shot into the grid and attached to an existing tile in that column or row of the board. Tiles cannot be shot into empty columns or rows.

Once a tile is moved from the periphery to the main board the two tiles behind the one played move closer to the board and a new tile fills the empty slot.

Whenever three or more touching tiles on the main board match they are removed. Any tiles formerly touching the cleared tiles slide until stopped in the direction they started in. If a tile originally came from below the board it will travel up until it either hits another tile in the board or fills the slot closest to the board on the peripheral area, pushing the other tiles there one row or column away from the board. Play continues until the board is filled or cleared. If cleared, a new board starts again with one tile of each pattern in the middle plus (some of the time) one or more randomly placed tiles.

The one gotcha here is that you must have at least one tile left when you clear the last match or the game just ends. This seems like either a bug or a poor decision on the part of the developer but in either case it's irritating.

You can chose the number of different patterns in play. The fewer patterns, the easier the game. The easiest variant has five patterns, the hardest ten. I find myself playing with seven patterns most of the time.

BrickShooter is a wonderful variant in the tile matching genre. It's difficult but not impossible to clear a board at the easier levels and does get progressively more difficult as you add more patterns.

Go To Page: 1 2