Drop Planets
Planets drop into a bowl, and two of the same size fuse into one of the next size up. The bowl is where this one parts company with the rest of the genre: it is a funnel, sloped on both sides with a rounded floor, so nothing settles where you aimed it.
The ladder runs from a small grey moon up through a rocky red one, an ice giant, a green ringed world, a purple striped giant and eventually a little sun, and each first sighting throws a “New planet unlocked” toast into the corner. A chip at the bottom edge shows which one is loaded next. That preview earns its space: knowing a moon is coming is the difference between dropping it onto the pair of moons already sitting at the bottom and burying them under something larger.
Why the bowl rarely fills
Points are paid per merge, not per drop, and the payout scales brutally with tier. Twenty for a pair of moons. One thousand two hundred and eighty when something near the top of the ladder meets its twin. The same merge that pays that much also deletes two of the largest objects in the bowl and lets everything resting on them collapse inward, which is exactly why a bowl that looks one drop away from disaster tends to sort itself out. Across a run that climbed from level one to level five and past eighteen thousand points, I never actually lost.
About this game
- Controls
- Slide the dropper along the top with the mouse or a fingertip and release to let go; a dashed line shows the fall. Send another too soon and it is simply ignored while a ring around the dropper runs down.
- Category
- Puzzle
- Orientation
- portrait
FAQ
- Does aiming matter as much as it does in a straight-sided jar?
- Much less. Both walls lean inward, so anything released near the rim rolls down to the middle regardless. Your choice of column decides which side of the mound a planet arrives on, not where it comes to rest.
- Why does my score keep climbing after I stop dropping?
- Because the mound never fully settles. Planets carry on rolling into one another and merging without you. I watched a score go from 180 to 340 across ten seconds of doing absolutely nothing.
- Is a nearly full bowl as bad as it looks?
- Often it is the opposite. The fullest my bowl ever got was immediately before two large planets found each other, paid out 1280 points at once, and dropped the whole pile back down to half height.
