Brickmatic: Brick Game

The handheld brick game console.

The one with the green screen and the four fat buttons.

One dot matrix — eleven columns by twenty rows — and everything is drawn on it. The games, the score panel, even the settings.

THE GAMES

• Tetromino & Pentamino — falling pieces, four cells and five
• Tank & Tank duel — hold the base, or fight over it
• Race & Race: curves — a straight road, then one that bends
• Snake — ten cells a second at the top of the dial
• Arkanoid — bat, ball, and a wall that gets quicker
• Stack shot & Wall shot — two games from one cannon
• Match — shapes to pair before the wave lands
• Frog — across the river, one hop at a time
• Virus — four of a colour in a line, and the germs go with them

NINE CASES

Moulded plastic and printed decals, three of them covered edge to edge in stickers. The glass follows your phone's light and dark setting, and the case goes with it.

THE DIALS

• SPEED and LEVEL, one to ten — set before a run, the way the hardware did
• Five dot styles to draw the grid with
• Sound on every move, or silence if you'd rather
• Every game gets faster as you go, and you can switch that off too

NO ACCOUNTS, NO INTERNET

Your phone keeps the scores. The app uploads nothing, syncs nothing, and the whole device works in flight mode.

Recent changes:
A thirteenth game: Virus. Line up four capsule halves of a colour to clear the germs, until the last one goes.

The device now explains itself: a short tip on each control a printed word cannot, and one line on every game the first time it starts. Switch them off, or bring them back, from the new TIPS row in settings.

Everything is set in the device's own typeface, so it looks the same on every phone, under a brighter new icon. A harsh click that replaced some sounds is fixed.