Hronka: Daily Word Arcade

Hronka is a daily word puzzle and a match-three ball shooter. You clear coloured balls to free letters and spell the day’s phrase. A chain of balls and letters rides a winding path towards its end. You throw balls into the chain, and three of a kind collapse. Letters that nothing holds any more come loose, and the ones you need fill the phrase. Every collapse pulls the chain back. If the chain reaches the end of its path, the round is lost. Each day has one phrase and one board for everyone. The boards come in shapes such as a spiral, a heart or a crown. There are four difficulties, and each one changes the board. The easiest boards have one winding path. A fork splits the chain into two fronts, and you defend both from one launcher. On the hardest boards, both paths end at the same place, and their danger adds up. You see the board before you start. Every board is tested before it ships. A strong computer player must finish it, and a careless one must fail. Endless play deals numbered runs. Run 47 at a given difficulty always has the same board, on every device. The phrases change through the week: song titles, film titles, idioms, proverbs, first lines of books, verse, and lines from the stage. Charms ride the chain as well. They can slow it, run it backwards or shake every letter loose. Hronka plays in nine languages: English, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish and French. Each language has its own songs, films, sayings and books, spelled in its own letters. The light and dark themes are both checked against the WCAG contrast rules. Hronka follows your phone’s reduce-motion setting, and the board can be played with TalkBack. Colour is never the only signal. A wanted letter has a notch, and the danger zone is a ticked band. A hit, a burst and a miss each move in their own way. There are no ads and no in-app purchases: you pay once. Hronka needs no account and plays offline. The name is Belarusian for a hanging cluster, such as a bunch of grapes.

Hronka's music now starts sooner after you open the game. Phones with little memory, including phones on Android 7, now play the music instead of only the game's sounds. Each day's music also has new instruments, among them cello, flute, trumpet, organ and accordion.