Dejeweled

Click image above to play. Arrow keys to move, Z to undo, X to select.

Basic rules

There's no in-game rules screen (yet) - this was never meant for public consumption. If you haven't played the original game, I'd recommend Bejeweled 2 as the best version of the game, go try that first - or buy Bejeweled 3, it's great too.

Classic mode in Dejeweled just (roughly) mirrors the original basic gameplay; Challenge mode is where things get interesting though.

Challenge mode

Every level, including the first, drops one black rock onto the grid at random. Rocks can't be swapped with normal gems. The four main ways to destroy them are:

  • Catch one in a power-gem explosion
  • Match it with another black rock (both disappear)
  • Match it with a hypercube (clears every rock on the grid)
  • Match two hypercubes together to wipe the whole board

Other methods exist, like engineering a row of three or four rocks, but they're very unlikely.

Other features

Undo (Z on keyboard, circle on controller) is available once per level, though not at the start of a new one. The indicator in the bottom right shows when it's active.

Move counter: the word "Dejeweled" on the right shows how many gems have moves available. One letter lights up light-grey per available move, so four moves lights "DEJE". Hypercubes show as white letters.

High scores are tracked per mode and shown in brackets at the bottom right. They persist between console reboots.

Music (by the fantastic Gruber) can be toggled through the PICO-8 menu: press Enter, or Start on a controller. Choose "continue" afterwards to resume your game.

Why I made this

Bejeweled was an obsession for a time. It's as close to a perfect puzzle game as I've ever played. But something was missing: the difficulty never really ramped. Later levels asked for more matches, not better ones. You just keep going until the board runs out of moves. I admire it's purity in that regard, but felt it needed something else to add to the strategic planning.

I spent years looking for a match-3 that could beat it and never found one. Almost every one I've tried in the last decade has pay-to-win baked in, or some other dark pattern. Eventually I gave up on the genre.

Then a few weeks ago I rediscovered PICO-8, bought back in 2016 and barely touched. Seeing all the 'demakes', I wondered if anyone had made a decent match-3, but couldn't find anything that scratched that itch on the BBS. So on a whim I bought Aseprite, meticulously drew the grid of gems and other graphics to see if it would even fit in 128x128, and asked Claude to build the thing, just to test my own variation on the rules. Hundreds of small changes over 24 hours later, it's pretty much done and I can't put the thing down.

Lexaloffle has a strict anti-AI policy on their BBS, and I don't blame them. I struggle with the quandary daily: the environmental cost of AI and the creative people on whose backs it's built, not to mention the impact on society, both hidden and direct. It's something I suspect many of us are struggling to learn to live with.

And yet. It's helped me make my dream game, and taught me a lot doing it. I still don't know what to do with that. But until I figure that out, I'll be playing this on my RG CubeXX in my spare moments, rather than wasting time doomscrolling!

Download your copy

I made this for myself, but if you want a copy you can download a compiled version for Mac, Windows, Linux, or Raspberry Pi, You can also download the PICO8 cart and load it manually into wherever you run PICO8, or just play it directly in the browser.