Stacked

Stacked is our take on the one-button tower stacker — the genre made famous by arcade lobby machines and the mobile game Stack. A block glides back and forth above your tower. Tap (or press space) and it drops. Whatever part of it overlaps the block below stays; the overhang shears off and tumbles away as debris. Your next block is only as big as what survived, so every sloppy drop makes the rest of the game harder. Miss entirely and the run is over.

We built it in 3D with a camera that rides up the tower as it grows, and we spent a surprising amount of time on the part nobody notices: the offcuts. When you clip a block, the severed piece physically falls off the tower and disappears below — it's a small thing, but it makes each mistake feel real instead of abstract.

How scoring works. Each placed block is a point, but the real game is the perfect streak. Land a drop almost exactly on top of the previous block — within a whisker of dead center — and it counts as a perfect: your block keeps its full size and a streak bonus starts building. Consecutive perfects are worth more and more, so one clean stretch in the middle of a run can outscore everything else you did. The slide speed also ramps as your score climbs, topping out around fifty placements, which is where good runs usually go to die.

One honest tip: don't watch the moving block — watch the tower edge and let the block enter your fixed point of focus. Rhythm beats reaction here; most long streaks come from tapping on a steady beat rather than trying to eyeball each drop. Your best height is saved on your device, so the only opponent is yesterday's you.