Dot Chain

How Dot Chain works

The board is a 6×6 grid of 36 dots in five colours. You play by drawing a chain: press on a dot, drag to a neighbouring dot of the same colour, and keep going. Dots link up, down, left and right — never diagonally — and every dot in a chain is the same colour. Let go, and the whole chain clears.

When dots clear, the dots above them fall to fill the gaps, and new dots drop in from the top, so the board is always full. A cleared dot is worth one point. A chain of two is the smallest move there is; a chain of eight is worth four of them, and also reshapes a large part of the board.

If you drag back onto the dot you just came from, the last link comes undone — the chain shortens by exactly one dot. That is how you correct a wrong turn without starting again, and it is what makes hunting for a loop practical.

Loops are the game

If your chain returns to a dot it already holds, it has closed a loop — and a loop clears every dot of that colour on the whole board, not just the dots you drew through. The smallest loop is a 2×2 square of one colour: drag round its four dots and back to where you started.

The difference is large. Take a board with a red square in one corner and two more red dots elsewhere. Dragging through three of the square's dots clears those three and scores 3. Closing the square instead clears all six red dots on the board — including the two you never touched — and scores 6. On a crowded board a loop can take a dozen dots at once.

A loop can close on any dot of the chain, not only the one you started from: a chain can run in from one side, go round a square, and finish by stepping back onto a dot it passed earlier. While a chain is looped, every dot it is about to take is outlined, so you can see the reach of it before you let go.

Because a loop clears a colour board-wide, the falls it causes are large too, and they often bring a new square together. Spotting squares — and seeing which drop will make one — is the entire skill.

The two modes

• 60 seconds — as many dots as you can in a minute. The clock starts on your first chain, not when the board appears, so you can look before you begin.
• 30 moves — thirty chains and no clock. Every chain counts as one move whatever its length, so this mode rewards patience: a two-dot chain spends a move as surely as a loop does.

Your best score in each mode is kept in your browser. A game in progress is not saved — a timed game cannot be paused, and a thirty-move game is a few minutes long.

The Fullscreen button gives the board the whole screen, with bigger dots that are easier to drag through and a page that cannot scroll out from under a long chain; Escape or the Exit button brings the page back.

Where the game comes from

This mechanic is Dots, released by Playdots in 2013. Game rules are not something anyone owns, and this is an independent implementation of them: none of the original's artwork, wording or presentation is reproduced here, and it has none of its power-ups or economy. It runs entirely in your browser, with no accounts, no leaderboards and nothing uploaded.