Drop7

Drop it, you've played enough.

Let's talk about addicting mobile phone puzzle games, shall we?

Scanning the list of upcoming games for the 1001 list a month or so ago, I came across Drop7, a title I'd never heard of before. Described by the writeup as a sort of mix of Tetris and Sudoku, but is neither, I was intrigued, and luckily for me, it was still freely available on the Play Store to download and give it a go.

Many hours later, phone batteries were dying through overuse, TV programs needed to be rewound to see what was missed, and even P2 is playing it far too often. I actually had to uninstall it from my phone to make sure I stopped playing it, only to download it for my Chromebook and, now, for the BlueStacks Android emulator on PC.

This is a staggeringly addictive game. Let's see what has got me hooked.

Fun Times

Today's Drop7 iteration is a fancier looking version of the original, but you can swap to the classic theme at any point, which is a simple colours-on-black affair.

You need to decide which columns to drop circles into, some containing numbers, others containing number eggs, I guess, that need to be cracked open to reveal the number inside.

Drop a 2 so that it sits in a group of just two connected circles, or is in the 2nd row of the grid, and it disappears, giving you 7 points and potentially cracking any nearby 'eggs', which each require two hits to burst open and reveal a new number.

After circles disappear, whatever is above them drops down, and another check is performed to see what else is completed. Above, the 2 is in a column of exactly two circles, and the 3 in a column of exactly three. If the 3 was a 4 instead, it would be considered connected in a row of four and would pop too.

Each chain of popped circles nets you more and more points, using a system I can't quite work out, but soon gets you hundreds of points per circle.

Each level has you drop a certain number of balls before a new row of grey eggs butts its way up from the bottom of the grid to give you more problems to solve, but may also immediately trigger a bunch of numbers to pop, and a change in level gives you 7,000 points, just because it's called Drop7, I suppose.

You'll know if you've got the hang of things if you manage to whittle down the grid to just a few lines, or even a few circles. I've only cleared the grid completely once, and it's pretty much designed to fill up, especially when an egg cracks into a 1 which you can do little about until you expose it somehow.

Despite throwing many, many hours at Drop7, I haven't gotten a strategy. You can set up chain reactions and wait for the perfect number to come in to set them off, but one cracked number in the wrong place can screw up your entire plan in an instant.

If a number goes off the top of the screen, your game comes to an end. To get rid of that 6 in column one in this situation, I'd have to get rid of the 4 below it. To do that, I need to build into the middle of the grid some more.

This 6 can be dropped into column three, but it'd immediately pop - it's column is now six circles high. It could be dropped into column four, but now that column is five circles high and the 5 will pop at the bottom, which is good for seeing what that cracked egg will reveal, but not good for building up to the 4 because now the 6 isn't high enough for me to use and I'm running out of drops...

This fifteen-minute game - which will definitely be the only game of Drop7 I play this afternoon before going for a long walk in the sun - wasn't anywhere near my best score, which somehow sits at some 350,000 points, but it feels great to set them, and then disappointing to see your new score average suffer at the next poor attempt, but then great again to raise it on the next...

Addicting, I tell you.

Final Word

If the Classic mode is too long for you - and games can go on and on it feels - then a Blitz mode will have the levels fly by after just a handful of drops, but if the puzzle is more your thing, you can try the Sequence mode, which will drop the exact same circles in the exact same order each and every time you play, so you can try (and probably fail) to math out the best possible position for your drops to chain them together for the high score.

Not that you get told what's coming next, though. You never do. Drop7 just tells you to deal with it. Got a 1 to drop? Deal with it. Got an annoying string of 1s clogging up your grid? Deal with it. Running out of room, or battery, or your eyes are starting to hurt? Deal with it.

There are not a lot of games that I've deemed dangerously addicting to me, but Drop7 is definitely on that list. It's thinky, but it's simple, but it's far more complex than it looks, but you're always making progress, but it's not always good progress...

Some match-three games come and go, you've seen them before, you know what they offer, and if they don't look appealing, you won't stick around for very long. Drop7 is a match-seven that you've never seen before, has secrets that you may never work out, and looks so swish that it now comes in two flavours, both of which look perfect for the kind of game it is, and it's free, with no adverts.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Fun Facts

Originally, Drop7 was designed to be an ARG to tie into the TV show Numb3rs and contain all kinds of secret stuff for players to unlock. Wikipedia doesn't know this, though, so don't tell them.

Drop7, developed by Area/Code Entertainment, first released in 2009.

Version played: Android, 2015.