Tideblocks: Tide Puzzle

The sea rises. The sea falls. It will never surprise you.

TIDEBLOCKS is a turn-based puzzle where the water level follows a cycle shown in plain sight on the gauge, several turns ahead. No randomness inside a level, no hidden information: if you fail, you misread the tide. One move is a step left, a step right, or a wait, and the cycle advances by one. Wood floats, stone sinks, a metal crate rusts the longer it soaks until it seizes for good, and the crab and the heron follow perfectly deterministic paths. Get the sailor to the beacon.

STORY MODE NEVER RUSHES YOU
• No timer.
• No death: enemies shove you aside, they never kill you.
• No move limit.
• Undo and restart as often as you like.
• If a position becomes genuinely unsolvable, the game notices and offers a restart. You will never waste ten minutes on a dead board.

1000 LEVELS, 8 WORLDS
Morning, Dusk, Night, Storm, Lagoon, Abyss, Ice Field, Cyclone. Each world adds a new mechanic, its own palette, and a new way to read the cycle: longer, more asymmetric tides, a shorter preview. Past the first sixty handcrafted levels, everything comes from a deterministic generator: every level is solved by a built-in solver before it reaches you, so it always has a solution, and the same number always yields the same level on every device.

FIVE WAYS TO PLAY
• STORY: a vertical saga map with your stars: one for finishing, two for landing within two moves of the optimal, three for matching it.
• SURVIVAL: the tension, kept in its own mode. Three lives, a move budget that tightens level after level, and one question: how far does your run go? A seed drawn at launch decides the run's levels: difficulty climbs the same way for everyone, but which levels come up, and in what order, changes with every run. Nothing to learn by heart, no one else's run to copy. You lose for inefficiency, never for slowness. You can still think as long as you like.
• DAILY CHALLENGE: one level a day, the same for everyone, with your consecutive-day streak.
• PERFECTION: the list of levels you have yet to three-star.
• ENDLESS ZEN: levels chained forever, generated from a seed, gentle difficulty, no score, no progression. Pick a puzzle family or let chance decide.
Plus a WORLD TOUR to sample every world without unlocking your way there.

YOU VERSUS THE OPTIMAL
No fake rivals. Your first opponent is the best possible solution, computed by the game's own solver on your device. Below it, the real scores of other players appear whenever you are online.

DRAWN IN CODE, PIXEL BY PIXEL
All the 16-bit pixel art is written in code: not a single image file ships with the app. The chiptune music and sound effects are synthesised while you play.

NO FORCED ADS
Tideblocks is free and funded by rewarded videos. Here is exactly what that means.
• No banners. No interstitials. No ad that opens by itself between levels, at launch, or at the end of a run.
• The only ads are videos YOU start, with a button, in exchange for a life in survival, a hint, or one more attempt at the daily challenge.
• Declining costs you nothing: all 1000 levels and all five modes stay fully available, forever.
• Zen mode never shows advertising of any kind.
• No in-app purchases, no virtual currency, no lives to buy back.

RESPECTFUL BY DESIGN
• Fully playable offline: on a plane, underground, anywhere. The network is only ever used to save your progress, show the leaderboard and load the videos you ask for. Never to play.
• No sign-up, no password, no email address asked for. Sign in with Play Games, if you like, to pick your progress back up on another device.
• No trackers, no analytics.
• A "reduced motion" option, and it honours the matching system setting.

Portrait screen, one hand, three buttons. Read the tide.