Bonds - Make Ten

Blocks fall. Any straight line that adds up to exactly ten clears away. That's the whole game. It's the ten-bond — the bit of arithmetic every child drills and every adult still has somewhere in muscle memory. 6 and 4. 7 and 3. 1, 2, 3 and 4 if you can set it up. IT NAMES THE BOND Clear a run and the board shows the sum that did it — 6 + 4 = 10. Not points flashing up: the actual arithmetic, so the pair gets named every time it's used. The four rules are explained with pictures before the first block falls, too. THREE GAMES, NOT ONE Easy never holds a digit back and runs a gentler clock — it's for learning the bonds, and it's the one to hand a child. Medium starts asking more of you. Hard withholds the digit you want and pushes a new row up from the floor every so often. Each keeps its own records, because a score on Easy isn't a score on Hard. CLEAR, THEN CLEAR AGAIN When a run clears, everything above it falls. Sometimes what lands makes ten too, and the board goes off a second time, and a third. Chains are the best thing that can happen and they pay accordingly. LONG RUNS PAY A pair is worth twenty. Four blocks in a row making ten is worth eighty — double what the same four blocks would pay as two unrelated pairs. Setting one up is worth the risk. IT GETS HARDER, NOT JUST FASTER Most falling-block games only speed up until your thumbs give out. Bonds does that too, but the real pressure is the board itself growing reluctant to give you what you need. You can't tap your way past that. EVERY GAME HAS A NAME Each game is built from a five-letter code shown on the end card. Same code, same blocks in the same order — so "beat this one" is a thing you can say. It pauses, for when tea's ready. And VoiceOver reads the board, the score and every control, so the game can be played without sight of it. No ads. No accounts. No tracking. No in-app purchases. Nothing leaves your device, because there's nothing to send — Bonds has no network code in it at all.