Trevolia Blocks

A tray crowded with painted blocks, and every single one of them stamped with one small arrow. That arrow is the whole puzzle. A block can leave the tray only by travelling in the direction it points, and only when every cell between it and the rim along that line is already empty. Anything standing in the way, even one neighbour, and the block stays exactly where it is. So the question is never which block you want to remove. It is which block the tray will actually let go of right now. You read the arrangement, find the pieces whose path to the edge is already clear, and pull those first. Each one you extract opens a corridor for something behind it. Each one you extract in the wrong order seals a corridor you were going to need later. A tray can look half solved and already be finished, with four blocks pointing patiently into one another and nowhere left to go. That is where the real thinking lives: not in speed, but in order. Before you tap, you trace the arrow of a block and ask what has to be gone before it, and what will be trapped once it is gone. You learn to spot the pairs that block each other, the piece in the centre that everything else depends on, and the long plank that needs an unusually wide run of empty cells to clear the rim. Look a few taps ahead and the tray unfolds in one clean sequence. Look at only the next tap and you will meet a deadlock you built yourself. There are twenty-five levels, and they grow in the ways that matter. Planks get longer, so they demand more clear space before they will budge. Trays get wider, so there is more to hold in your head at once. And from level fifteen onwards your taps are counted, which quietly changes everything: there is no more trying a block to see what happens, no more nudging the arrangement about hoping it comes good. You have to be right before you touch anything. The handling itself stays as simple as it can be. One tap, one block, no dragging and no aiming. All the difficulty sits in the reading of the board rather than in your fingers, which makes it the sort of puzzle you can pick up for a single tray or settle into for an hour. Solve it in long calm stares, or restart a stubborn level and realise on the second attempt that the order was obvious all along.

Trevolia Blocks