Comparison

Sudoku Sages vs Gem Falls

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Sudoku Sages

Features
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Sudoku without the noise, made for players who enjoy taking their time. No ads, subscriptions, in-app purchases, forced streaks, or analytics. All nine themes are included from the start, and there is no separate account to create. DIFFICULTY THAT MEANS SOMETHING Puzzles are graded by the logical techniques needed to solve them, not simply by the number of given digits. A human-style solver checks every puzzle step by step. Six philosopher-named tiers range from the approachable Thales to the demanding Socrates. CHOOSE HOW MUCH HELP YOU WANT Puzzle difficulty and assistance are separate settings: • Beginner — highlights, mistake checking, and hints are enabled. • Normal — highlights and hints are available when you ask for them. • Hardcore — no highlights or mistake checking, just pencil marks. HINTS WITH AN EXPLANATION A hint does not immediately fill in the answer. It first names the technique and points you towards the relevant part of the board, giving you a chance to spot the move yourself. If you need more help, you can follow the reasoning one step at a time and then apply the move. Hints also work when you have not entered any pencil marks. ACHIEVEMENTS WITHOUT OBLIGATIONS Game Center can mark your first solved puzzle, each difficulty tier, and the completion of all six. There are no achievements for daily logins or hundreds of repetitive games. Game Center is entirely optional. NINE COMPLETE THEMES Dark paper, classic, newsprint, blueprint, neon, chalk, and more. Each theme changes the whole board rather than simply recolouring a few controls. Every theme is free and available from the beginning. Games, settings, and records stay on your device. The app has no servers, analytics, or account system of its own. If you use Game Center, only achievement progress is sent to Apple. Sound is off by default. Available in English, Russian, and Japanese.

About

Gem Falls

Features
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Match three or more, watch the cascade take the rest, and keep going. Gemfall is an endless match-3 built for picking up and putting down. Every level asks for something different. Clear a colour, break through the ice, bring the cargo home. And when you close the app mid-run, the board, the score and your powerups are waiting exactly as you left them. No timer running against your day, no lives to wait for, no move you have to make right now. FOURTEEN WORLDS Every level is set somewhere, and where never changes: level two is a Maya temple in the jungle, level four is a dead valley under an erupting volcano, and they will be next time too. A wreck on the sea floor. A sweet factory. A frozen kingdom, a haunted mansion, a marble gate in the clouds, a garden at sunset, a gorge full of waterfalls, a toy box at the end of the afternoon, a fjord under the northern lights. Each world has its own six pieces, its own board, and its own weather in the air above it. CLASSIC Endless levels, each with its own objective. Chain your matches to build heat, and every gem on the board is worth more while it lasts. Clear the level, fall through the warp, and the next one asks a little more of you. TIME ATTACK Sixty seconds. Every match buys you a few more. See how far you can stretch the clock. POWER GEMS Four in a row makes a gem that clears a whole line. An L or a T makes one that blows a hole in the board. Five in a row makes the star. The rarest piece in the game and worth waiting for. Put two power gems together and the board comes apart. ICE, STONE AND CARGO Later levels do not just hand you the board. Ice freezes gems in place until you break the shell. Stone blocks take repeated knocks. Cargo has to be walked all the way to the bottom before it counts. FAIR BY DESIGN · Free. No in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no ads. Nothing is locked behind a paywall, because there is no paywall. · Fully playable offline. · Nothing is collected. No analytics, no tracking, no account, no sign-up. Your run lives on your phone and nowhere else. · The six gems differ in shape as well as in colour, so they stay apart if you do not see colour the way most people do. GAME CENTER Sign in to Game Center and your best Classic and Time Attack scores go on Apple's global leaderboards. Skip it and the game plays exactly the same, minus a rank. Gemfall is built from scratch in Swift for iPhone, rebuilt from the browser game of the same name. iPhone, portrait, iOS 18 or later.

Screenshots

Sudoku Sages4 screens
Gem Falls4 screens

Verdict

The call

Sudoku Sages and Gem Falls are too close to call on the numbers: across 6 compared parameters — price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Sudoku Sages ships an update every 8 days, Gem Falls weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and October 29, 2026 respectively.

ScorecardNo meaningful differences
Sudoku Sages versus Gem Falls: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterSudoku SagesGem Falls
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 8 daysWeekly — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPad — betteriPhone
Requires iOS17.0 — better18.0
Further details — not scored
Size3 MB51 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperJOE BELLSandrino Kelders

In-app purchases

None

Sudoku Sages

No in-app purchases

None

Gem Falls

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Sudoku Sages free?
Sudoku Sages is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Gem Falls free?
Gem Falls is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Sudoku Sages or Gem Falls have ads?
Neither Sudoku Sages nor Gem Falls shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Sudoku Sages or Gem Falls?
Sudoku Sages ships an update every 8 days, and Gem Falls weekly. Most recently, Sudoku Sages was updated on October 31, 2026 and Gem Falls on October 29, 2026.

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