Fruit Drop
A free fruit merge game that runs in your browser. Fruit fall into an open box, two of the same kind that touch become the next one up the chain, and the whole pile resettles underneath them. Ten rungs, blueberry to watermelon. The run ends when something comes to rest above the line at the top.
- Free
- No ads
- No account
- No download
- Works offline
- Single player
How do you play?
- Aim - The waiting fruit follows your finger along the top of the box. Arrow keys move it too.
- Drop - One tap and it goes. Enter or Space does the same from a keyboard.
- Touch two alike - Two of the same kind that touch become the next rung. They do not have to be stacked, a graze is enough.
- Watch the top - The run ends when a fruit sits still for half a second above the line. While it is still moving, nothing happens.
About this game
Tap the box. A fruit falls. Two alike that touch turn into one bigger fruit, and everything under them shifts. That is the whole rule.
The physics is written out by hand in the game's own rules file, with no engine behind it, and that is worth knowing because it explains what the box can and cannot do. Everything is a circle. Two circles overlap exactly when the distance between their centres is under the sum of their radii, and the way to push them apart is along that same line. No polygons. No rotation. About forty lines of arithmetic covers it, and because it is arithmetic rather than a canvas the step is a pure function: the same box and the same slice of time give back the same pile, on a phone and on a desktop alike. It runs at a fixed 120 sub-steps a second while the drawing spends whatever real time has passed, so a 60 Hz screen and a 120 Hz screen simulate at one rate.
Here is the number we went looking for. A merge does not only score, it changes the shape of everything beneath it, so the pile resettles and sometimes folds two more pairs together that nobody lined up. Across 240 simulated runs on the shipped physics, 33.2% of a careful bot's merges were set off by an earlier merge rather than by its own drop. A bot dropping at random reached 47.5%. A third to a half of this game plays itself, and that is the part that feels good.
Two bots, 40 runs on each box each. Random aiming survives 123.1 fruit in the wide box and 82.0 in the narrow one, for 589 and 378 points. One rule changes the picture: aim at a twin you can actually reach, and drop wherever when there is none. That bot lasts 156.8 fruit and scores 946 in the same wide box.
The admission, and you can see it with your eyes. The solver runs five separation passes per sub-step, and five is not enough for a deep pile. Measured on the final pile of every settle, two fruit ended up 1.6 world units inside one another, which is half a blueberry's radius. Nothing rolls either, because a fruit has no spin to store. Look closely at a crowded box and both are there.
What does it teach?
Seeing a consequence coming
A third of all merges arrive from another merge. Spotting that before you tap is two-step reasoning, learned without a single line of instructions.
Ordering by size
Ten rungs in a row, each about 1.2 times wider than the last. A child learns the order by handling it rather than by reciting it.
Living with a mess
A pile here never fully tidies and the game carries on regardless. Playing on with an imperfect result is its own lesson.
Tips
Big fruit belong on the walls
A fruit that grows shoves its neighbours. Against a wall it can only shove one way, so the room it frees stays in the middle, which is where you need it.
A reachable twin beats a better one
The winning bot never aims at a twin buried under three other fruit. It takes the one a straight drop actually lands on, and that small difference is worth 33.7 extra fruit a run in the wide box.
Do not plug holes with blueberries
The box only ever deals the bottom five rungs. A blueberry parked in a gap to fill it stays there until a second blueberry arrives, and it lifts the whole pile while it waits.
What age is it for?
4 to 5
The wide box. Nothing to read, one tap is the whole control, and fruit merge by themselves often enough to feel rewarding.
6 to 8
The middle box, where aiming starts to pay. Our careful bot lasts 120.7 fruit there against 98.6 for the random one.
Grown-ups
The narrow box, 52 units across. One watermelon is 35.6 units wide on its own, so two can never sit side by side and the end of the chain becomes a real target.
Accessibility
One tap does everything, and dragging to aim is never required. The box itself is a real button: left and right arrows walk the waiting fruit along the top, Enter or Space lets it go, so the whole game plays from a keyboard with no mouse and no touchscreen. Every rung has its own hue, its own size and its own drawing, so a player who reads colour poorly still tells the fruit apart by something else. There is no clock anywhere. The pile stops moving by itself, and a run you walked away from comes back exactly as you left it.
Playing together
One fruit each
Take turns dropping into the same box. The score is shared, so a bad choice belongs to everybody, which is far funnier than losing alone.
Call the cascade
Before the tap, say how many merges the drop will set off. One merge in three brings another, so the guess is rarely right first time.
Hunting the watermelon
Across 240 simulated runs a watermelon turned up in 3 of them, all in the wide box, and no two of them ever met. A person does better than that, and it is worth the try.
Common questions
What happens when two watermelons meet?
Both vanish and leave the space empty. There is no rung above them, so the pair pays 155 points at once instead of making an eleventh fruit.
How many kinds of fruit are there?
Ten rungs. The box only ever hands you five of them, the small ones, drawn with the smallest weighted heaviest. The top five have to be built.
What changes between the levels?
The width of the box and nothing else: 74, 62 or 52 units. The fruit, the chain and the draw are identical across all three, so switching is not learning a different game.
How long does a run last?
About 91 fruit in the narrow box and 157 in the wide one for our better bot, over 40 runs per box. A human first go looks more like the random one, so 82 and 123.
Is there a pause button?
No, deliberately. Nothing moves once the pile has settled and no clock is running, so walking away costs you nothing at all.
How is the record measured?
In points, where more is better, and separately for each box width. Two blueberries are worth 1 point, a pair one rung up is worth 3, and it climbs from there.
Does it work offline?
Yes, after one visit. Nothing to install and no account to make.