Bubble Pop

The board, and what clears a level

The board is one fixed screen, 320×672 units, with no camera and no scrolling. Bubbles sit in a honeycomb grid: even rows hold 8 columns, odd rows hold 7, offset by half a bubble so each one nests in the gap left by the row above.

A level's starting layout comes from the level number and a fixed seed, so every player meets the same board on the same level — and the same player meets it again after an app update. A fired bubble always lands in the nearest empty cell, so where a shot ends up is never a guess.

• Cleared: every bubble is gone from the board.
• Failed: a bubble's bottom edge reaches the dotted line above the launcher.
• One shot resolves in a single step: it lands, pops if it completes a group of 3 or more of the same color, and anything left with no connected path back to the ceiling falls right along with it.

Ties for nearest cell are broken the same way every time — the higher row wins, and if that is still tied, the left column does. The same aim always lands in the same cell.

Controls, and the guide line

• Drag to aim; the launcher tracks the angle from the launch point to your finger, and releasing fires.
• The angle is clamped to 70° from vertical on either side, so a shot is never closer to sideways than that — this board is meant to be broken down from above, not raked across.
• On a keyboard, ← → adjust the angle in 2° steps and Space fires, with the same clamp.
• A full trajectory line is always on, tracing every wall bounce out to the exact cell your shot will land in. It is computed by the same simulation that fires the shot, reading the same live board — what it shows and what happens can never disagree.

The line marks only the landing cell — not what color group it completes, what falls, or what chains after. Reading the board for that part is the game.

The ceiling, and the line that ends a level

Every few shots, the ceiling drops by one row. How many shots you get between drops tightens as you climb — 8 apart at level 1, 5 apart at level 100 — and that count is shown as a row of dots, never a countdown number.

• The failure line sits a fixed 1.5 row-heights above the launcher, drawn as a dotted line and nothing else.
• The instant any bubble's bottom edge reaches that line, the level ends — however many bubbles are still up there.
• Nothing moves while you aim, including the ceiling. Firing costs you a shot; thinking costs nothing.

At level 100, the deepest starting board still leaves roughly 8 rows — about 40 shots — of room above the line. That margin is deliberately tight: a board with room to spare would make the line decorative, and this series does not stage urgency it does not mean.

The 100 levels

Four levers move with the level number, all continuously — nothing plateaus before level 100.

• The 6 colors are fixed in order — blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, cyan — and every level's palette is a prefix of that list, so a color already in play is never swapped out as levels add more.
• Clearing a level unlocks the next one; any cleared level can be replayed, and the unlocked frontier never moves backward.

That last lever stays modest even at level 100 — the ceiling and the shrinking gap between its drops are already carrying most of the difficulty, so generation does not also need to fight you for a layout.

The help you get

• There is no Undo. A shot resolves the instant it lands, pop and fall included, so there is no single move left to take back.
• There is no Hint. The trajectory guide already shows exactly where a shot will land; choosing what to send there is the game.
• The current and next bubble are always shown ahead of time, and swapping them is free and unlimited.
• A newly drawn color only ever comes from colors still on the board — but once a bubble is shown as current or next, it keeps that color even if every other bubble of it pops elsewhere in the meantime.
• Retry is instant, free and unmetered, and it returns the exact same board. Nothing is re-rolled between attempts, so what you learned still applies.

Losing is not a dead end and clearing one is not a score: statistics record attempts, clears and total play time, and nothing else. No streak is counted here, or shown.

Reading the board, and a couple of tips

• Each of the 6 colors also carries its own inner mark — circle, triangle, square, diamond, star, crescent — so color is never the only signal.
• Sending a shot into a cluster hanging with nothing above it drops far more bubbles than popping a small group does, because everything disconnected falls with it, not only what matched.
• A wall bounce costs nothing extra, so a steep, indirect angle is often the only way to reach a gap the ceiling has boxed in.
• Swapping current and next costs nothing either, so holding an awkward color for a better opening is free — there is rarely a reason to fire a bubble you cannot place well.

The trajectory guide, the swap and the retry are on for every player, every level — no game feature is ever behind an ad or a purchase.

Questions people ask