Tetris

Full seven-piece Tetris

All seven standard pieces, a next-piece preview, a ghost piece showing where the current piece will land, and real line-clear scoring — the complete classic ruleset, not a simplified version.

A game older than most of its players

Tetris was designed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer, and its journey to becoming one of the best-known video games in history — including a famously tangled international licensing dispute in the years right after — is its own well-documented story worth reading about if the game itself doesn't already have your attention. The seven-piece set here (I, O, T, S, Z, J, L) is the same standard "tetromino" lineup nearly every version since has used.

Use the ghost piece

The faint outline showing where the current piece will land isn't decoration — lean on it for precise placement instead of eyeballing the drop, especially once speed increases with level and there's less time to react. Clearing four lines at once (a "Tetris") scores far more than four separate single-line clears, so it's often worth holding a gap open on one side and building up rather than clearing every line the moment you can.

Keeping the stack flat matters more than clearing fast

The single most common way a beginner's game ends isn't bad luck with pieces — it's letting the stack grow uneven and tall on one side while ignoring gaps that get buried underneath overhanging pieces, which then can't be cleared until the piece sitting on top of them clears first. Prioritizing a flat, even stack over immediate line clears, especially early in a game when there's no time pressure yet, avoids the buried-hole problem that causes most avoidable losses.

Using the next-piece preview to plan, not just react

The preview shows the upcoming piece specifically so decisions can be made one piece in advance rather than purely reactively — deliberately leaving a gap shaped for a piece you can see is coming, or avoiding a placement that would only work well with a piece you know isn't next, is the difference between playing tetris reactively and actually planning two pieces ahead.