Block Blast vs Blockudoku: what's actually different

The same family, one shared rule

Both games come from the same lineage of block-fitting puzzles that took off on mobile in the last few years — Block Blast, 1010!, Woodoku and Blockudoku all share the founding constraint: you're handed a small batch of pieces, usually three, and every piece has to land somewhere on the grid exactly as shown, because none of them can be rotated. That single restriction is what turns a fitting puzzle into a planning puzzle — an L-shape you can't turn is a much harder thing to place than an L-shape you can spin to face any direction.

Clear a full row or column and it disappears, freeing space for the next batch. Fail to fit a piece anywhere on the board and the run is over. That much is identical between Block Blast and Blockudoku, and it's why someone who's played one recognizes the other instantly.

The rule that changes everything: 3×3 squares

Block Blast plays on a plain 8×8 grid with exactly two ways to clear space: fill a row, or fill a column. Blockudoku plays on a 9×9 grid — sized, not coincidentally, like a Sudoku board — with a third way built in: fill any of the nine 3×3 boxes that tile the grid, and it clears too, on top of rows and columns.

That third clearing condition sounds like it should make the game easier, since there are more ways to score. In practice it does the opposite. A 3×3 box only holds nine cells, and most pieces cover an awkward shape inside it, so boxes fill unevenly and often get stranded with one or two cells that nothing you're holding can reach. Planning for three overlapping clearing conditions at once — a row, a column, and a box that all cross through the same cell — is a meaningfully harder planning problem than juggling two.

Why Blockudoku feels tighter, move for move

On an 8×8 board, a piece placed badly costs you part of a row and part of a column — two lines to repair. On Blockudoku's 9×9 board, the same bad placement can cost you a row, a column, and a box at once, because those three regions overlap far more densely than rows and columns do on their own. That's the real source of the reputation Blockudoku has for punishing sloppy play: the grid isn't bigger by much, but every cell belongs to more groups that can go wrong.

The flip side is that a genuinely good move in Blockudoku can pay out three clears at once instead of two, which is why high scores in the Sudoku-style version tend to come from patient, boxed-in play rather than the faster, looser rhythm that works on a plain grid.

Scoring and combos: similar shape, different math

Both games reward chaining: clear something on consecutive placements and the score for each clear climbs, so a streak of small clears in a row usually beats one big clear in isolation. Multi-line clears — two or three regions at once — score more than the same regions cleared one at a time in either game.

The difference is what counts as a region to chain. In Block Blast that's rows and columns, full stop. In Blockudoku a single well-placed piece can trigger a row, a column and a box together, which is the single highest-value move either game offers — and also the hardest to set up on purpose rather than stumble into.

Where to actually play the Block Blast side, free

Block Crush is our own take on the Block Blast half of this comparison: the plain 8×8 grid, no rotation, three pieces at a time, rows and columns clearing exactly as described above — running free in a browser tab, no download and no account. If the 3×3-square version is what you're after, Blockudoku itself is the one to search out; we haven't built a Sudoku-style version of the mechanic, so we'd rather point you at the real thing than pretend otherwise.

Either way, the piece you're best off memorizing first is the same in both games: the 3×3 square block, the one shape that ends more runs than any other because it needs an open pocket no other piece requires. Keep one corner clear for it and both games get noticeably less stressful.

Block CrushDrag, fit, blast the linesPlay now

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• Block Crush — Drag, fit, blast the lines