Solstice — circular match-3 around a hungry sun

What is Solstice — circular match-3 around a hungry sun

Solstice takes the match-three idea and wraps it around a star. Instead of a rectangular grid, the board is a disc: four concentric orbits of twelve gems each, turning around a sun. Every move is one of two things. You drag along an orbit to rotate all twelve of its gems by one sector, or you drag a single gem inward or outward to trade places with its neighbour in the next orbit. Three or more gems of the same colour — side by side along an orbit, or lined up across the orbits — burst and pour their light into the sun. Each level asks for a fixed number of gems.

What the circle changes is that nothing has an end. An orbit is a closed loop, so rotating it never pushes a gem off the board, and the twelfth sector sits beside the first: matches wrap around the back. When gems burst, the survivors slide inward toward the sun instead of falling down, and fresh gems arrive from the darkness on the outer rim. Cascades multiply your score by the wave number, and a HEAT gauge climbs one step per scoring move, up to five. Miss once and it drops back to one, which is why a blank move hurts more than it looks.

How to play

1. Pick Classic for an endless climb, or the Daily Challenge, where every player in the world gets exactly the same board that day.
2. Drag along an orbit to turn it one sector; a quick tap on the left or right half of a ring does the same thing, faster.
3. Drag a gem toward the sun or away from it to swap it with its neighbour in the next orbit, then check both directions for groups.
4. Reach the quota under the bar before your moves hit zero to advance a level; if the moves run out first, the run ends there.

Strategies that work

• HEAT rises one step per move, so climbing from ×1 to ×5 takes four productive moves in a row, and one blank move throws all four away. Before a speculative rotation, ask whether you can afford the multiplier: a three-gem burst is worth 30 points at ×1 and 150 points at ×5.
• A radial match clears three of the four cells in a spoke, so almost a whole column is replaced at once and the new gems land where the next wave can start. A ring match only pulls each affected spoke inward by one. When you want cascades, hunt the radial line.
• The twelfth sector of an orbit touches the first, so a pair at the end of a ring plus one gem at the start already count as three. Trace each orbit all the way round before deciding there is nothing there: the match most often missed is the one crossing the seam.
• Dead stars arrive at level four and take two hits; they crack only when gems burst in a cell beside them, along the ring or across the orbits. They pay 40 points times your multiplier but never count toward the quota, so break them early, before they sink inward and clog the inner orbit.
• Finishing early pays twenty points per unused move plus fifty times the level number: clearing level five with eight moves in hand adds 410 points. Quotas climb to a ceiling of forty-two gems while moves fall to thirteen by level eight, so early efficiency decides the run.

A little history

Solstice was written for Puzzle-Me as an experiment in what happens to a match-three board when it loses its corners. Tile-swapping puzzles have lived on square grids since the 1990s, and almost every rule players take for granted — gravity pulling downward, edges where rows stop, columns refilled from the top — comes from that shape, not from the idea. Concentric rings remove all three at once: gravity becomes an inward pull, rows become closed loops with no ends, and columns become spokes four cells deep. The sun, the heat gauge and the quota were added afterwards to give that geometry a purpose.

Frequently asked questions