Overripe

Shapes appear and start growing. Let one reach full size and it costs you a life.

That is the whole game, and the trick is in one detail: the biggest shape on screen is always the oldest one, and always the closest to costing you. So the greedy play and the surviving play are the same play - you never have to choose between scoring and staying alive. Take them in the order they arrived and the score compounds.

THE RUN

Every wave lasts eighteen seconds and ends in a push, the last six running at double speed. Then the board clears and you pick a card.

You get one after every single wave, three to choose from. They start small - the whole game runs slower, or part of the board freezes solid, or every pop throws out a fragment that kills what it hits. Take the same card again and it gets stronger. New kinds unlock at wave 5 and wave 10, so getting there is its own reward.

The cards talk to each other. Freeze half the board and the frozen shapes shatter when a fragment hits them, throwing another fragment onward - so a single tap can run a chain across the whole field, if you set it up.

Nothing plays itself. Every card pays for a tap you already made; none of them tap for you. At wave 30 with everything maxed you are still reading the board and still taking the oldest thing on it - the fragments are just what your tap is now worth.

WHAT IT ASKS OF YOU

Order. The oldest shape is the biggest, so age is something you read rather than something you are told. No arrows, no highlights. Pop them in sequence and the multiplier climbs; take the wrong one and it drops a step.

Peripheral vision. Shapes arrive away from wherever you last tapped. They brighten and pulse as they ripen - brightness and motion, the two things the corner of your eye is actually good at, because colour is not.

Nerve. Formations arrive as figures - a queue of ten, a lattice, a spiral - that you read as a shape instead of as ten decisions. The lights go out and come back with a board already half grown. And once in a while something arrives that shrinks instead of growing, blinking, and pays out in proportion to how fast you get to it.

Ten lives, spent once. Nothing ever refills unless you choose a card that says so. Runs last a few minutes at first and a good deal longer once you know what to build.

No ads. No purchases. No account. Portrait, one thumb, any length of a queue.