Damga: Tile Match Puzzle

Find three of the same mark, take them, watch them go.

Damga is a quiet matching puzzle. The tiles are stacked, and only the ones with nothing on top of them can be lifted. A tile you touch goes to the seven-slot tray below, and when three of the same mark gather there they break and are gone. If the tray fills, you lose. That is the only pressure in the game: no clock, no timer, no lives.

TWO WORLDS, ONE GAME

Orhun: the real letters of the Göktürk inscriptions, cut into sandstone and rubbed with earth pigment. The letters are not invented — they come from Unicode's Old Turkic block, and the twelve used here were chosen by measuring which are furthest apart in silhouette.

Çini: motifs from the sixteenth-century İznik workshops — tulip, carnation, pomegranate, hyacinth, saz leaf, fish, bird — painted on white glazed porcelain in cobalt, bole red, emerald and manganese purple.

Switch between them whenever you like. They are not recolours of one another: different material, different ground, different marks.

FORTY-EIGHT KINDS, THREE OF EACH

Every board holds exactly three of each mark. Not four, not nine — so finding a tile's two partners is real work rather than something that happens by itself. Twelve shapes in four colours, the way mahjong has done it for centuries.

BOARDS THAT DO NOT RUN OUT

Sixteen board shapes were drawn by hand — Ocak, Kandil, Sekizgen, Kemer, Şadırvan, Mihrap, Yıldız, Lale, Çintemani, Kubbe, Çeşme, Minare, Selsebil, Han, Kule, Kum Saati — most named after Ottoman architecture and a few after a motif: the tulip, the çintemani, the Seljuk star. They grow from twenty-seven tiles to a hundred and forty-four. The puzzle itself is generated fresh every time, and every board is winnable by construction: the game builds it by *playing* it, so the line you have to find certainly exists. When the shapes run out the largest six cycle forever, and from there on every board demands planning.

The difficulty climbs slowly. The first boards can be finished without thinking ahead; the later ones ask you to use the tray.

ONE UNDO, ONE HINT

Every board gives you one undo and one hint. The undo takes back your last tap, along with the triple that tap completed. The hint does not point at a legal tile — every free tile is legal — it points at a set you can *finish*: one tile when the tray already holds two of its kind, all three when a whole set is lying in the open. You can start a board over at any time.

ADVERTS, PLAINLY

There is no banner. The board is never covered.

A rewarded video appears only when you ask for one — another undo or hint, or two tiles back off a full tray. Never ask, never see one.

An interstitial can appear only when you finish a level: none at all for the first five, then at most one every three levels and never less than three minutes apart. Never after a loss.

A single purchase removes the between-level adverts for good. Rewarded videos keep working, because what is sold is the interruption, not the favour you asked for.

No account, no sign-in, no analytics. Where you got to is kept on your own phone and can be erased from Settings in one tap. Adverts are served by Google AdMob.

The sounds are recordings of struck ceramic rather than synthesised beeps. A slow piece in the Hicaz mode plays underneath, and can be switched off.

NINETEEN LANGUAGES

Turkish, English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Arabic, Persian, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Arabic and Persian mirror the whole interface right to left.

Recent changes:
Your board is kept now. Swipe back or take a call and it is exactly as you left it when you return.

Back means back again. It used to open a "Paused" panel that swallowed the next back, so the game could not be left at all — and Damga has no clock, so there was nothing to pause. The panel is gone. The first half-second after you return ignores taps instead, so a thumb still reaching for the app icon cannot cost you a tile.

The hint proves the third tile can be reached before pointing at a set.