Gridspire

Gridspire is a block puzzle. Drag pieces from the tray onto an 8×8 grid, fill a row or a column, and it clears for points. It plays one-handed, and when nothing left in the tray fits, the game is over and you start another. What the rest of the block puzzle shelf does not have is Ascent. It is a ladder of levels that starts over every Monday, and the one part of the game you can win. Each level sets a single goal: reach a score, or collect every gem on the board. The board sets terms of its own. A bomb sits on the grid with a fuse counting down the moves you have left, and clearing the line it stands in defuses it for a bonus; let the fuse reach zero and the run ends there. From the fifth level up a frosted cell joins in. A line through frost still clears, but the cell stays where it is, cracked, and only thaws on the second clear. Clear a level and you move up a rung. Lose it and you play the same level again, so you never slide back down. Away from Ascent there are two more ways to play. Endless has no clock at all: place, clear, chase your best score, and switch between Easy, Normal and Hard whenever you want. Time Attack puts the same board against a timer and keeps a best score of its own. Every twenty lines you clear in Endless, the board changes its look. There are six, each with its own colours, its own cell shape and its own way of sweeping in, and emptying the board completely brings the next one straight away. Ascent takes one per level instead. The app follows Light, Dark or whatever your phone is set to. Gridspire is paid once and that is the whole transaction. There are no ads in it, no in-app purchases and no subscriptions, so nothing interrupts a game to ask for money and nothing expires. It runs offline, asks for no account and no email, and sends nothing beyond standard usage analytics. There are no leaderboards and no online play: your scores stay on the device. It plays on iPhone and iPad, and on iPhone Duo it uses the whole inner screen while the phone is open. In English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Russian.