Sugar Crush

Match-3 is the most-copied puzzle format in the world for a reason — the loop of "swap, watch cascade, get dopamine" is borderline chemical. Sugar Crush is my version, written from scratch in vanilla JS with the satisfying particle bursts I always wished the mobile-app versions had instead of yet another pop-up offering to sell me lives. There's no energy system here. Play as long as you want, lose because you're tired, not because you ran out of hearts.

The strategic difference between a beginner and a confident match-3 player is looking for cascades, not matches. A match-3 in the bottom row drops the entire column above it, and a smart move sets up an automatic match in that falling column. Look for situations where the column has alternating colours that will line up after a single bottom-row clear. The score multiplier from a six-deep cascade dwarfs anything you can get from individually matching candies.

About the special candies

Match 4 gives a striped candy that clears a whole row or column when activated. Match 5 in an L or T shape gives a wrapped candy that explodes 3x3. Match 5 in a straight line gives the rainbow bomb. The fun is in combining specials — swapping two stripes together clears a row and a column from the intersection. If you like puzzle cascades, our Block Blaster works on a different but related grid-clearing principle.