Sand Tetris Duel

How to play

1. A game will open by default at the main page with a random seed. You can just jump in and play, or pick your own seed or replay a seed. The seed determines the shapes and colors of the pieces you get. You and the AI receive the same exact sequence of piece shapes and colors so it's a fair battle.
2. Move and rotate your falling piece, then drop it wherever it fits. Sand grains fall and settle independently after each placement.
3. Connect grains of the same color from one wall to the other to clear them. The only condition for clearing is that a group of same color sand touches both wall. A group can only be formed when grains touch orthogonally.
4. After 100 pieces, the side that cleared more grains wins. You can replay the same seed or start a new match.

About the game

Sand Tetris Duel grew from the popular game Sandtris, a falling sand take on Tetris. Pieces break into moving grains instead of staying locked to a grid. The gameplay is pretty intuitive once you play a few rounds.

I trained an AI to play the game basically. It is pretty decent from my test runs. It managed to survive 216,892 steps/pieces at one run, which is over 24 hours of gameplay, at about 0.25-0.3s per piece. The AI doesn't run that fast in the duel mode, instead it matches your speed for better experience. You can see in real time where the AI is placing the pieces, and the same seed helps since you are basically playing the same game. More technical details of the AI can be found in my github.

As I said the AI is decent, but there is a benchmark needed. Is it actually human level? This game is to test that. From my experience it isn't unbeatable at all, since the 100 piece cutoff gives room for error to both sides. If it was until game over instead of 100 pieces, then AI would just win, unless if people are willing to play for hours, even days. 100 pieces is the sweet spot.

Signed in matches contribute to your record and the leaderboard when they finish. The leaderboard ranks players by wins minus losses, with grains cleared breaking ties.

About me

I'm Arda. If you have any feedbacks, suggestions or just want to contact me, use the links below. I would massively appreciate any feedback, so feel free to reach out.