TenMaster Crisis — Dark Edges at 36 Cells, Special Cubes at 40: How to Read a Closing Board

TenMaster

HaniLab Master Series · Android

Google Play Download at hanilab.app

TENMASTER STORY · 08

Eight empty cells,
and nowhere to put anything

There are still eight empty cells on the board, yet two of the pieces in the tray have gone dim. Every one of those cells is a single-cell hole, and there is not one spot with two cells side by side. This is how a TenMaster crisis arrives — not because you ran out of cells, but because you ran out of the right shape of cells.

This TenMaster crisis story is about the moment the board closes in: the thresholds where the game changes as the board fills, the fact that a level can start you right next to one of them, how to read a board full of holes, how a single brick can block a 3×3 spot, and the order in which to use Time Freeze, Hint and Refresh — all from the game’s code and real gameplay screens.

8 empty cells, all single holes — only the one-cell piece is bright, the two-cell and 3×3 pieces are dim (the holes were set up for this shot)

An 8×8 board has 64 cells. The code keeps measuring how full the board is (bricks included) and changes the game at a few points. Converted to cell counts:

The two signals are different in nature. The edge is a status display — in the code’s own words, slow and not blinking, because showing a blink and a state the same way makes both unreadable — while the red squeeze three seconds before a brick falls is a momentary warning. The edge darkens, and only at the very end does a little red come back into it.

Whenever a board is freshly laid out (new game, continue, retry), numbers are pre-filled according to the level. From level 10 that is 26 cells (41%); from level 130 it is 34 cells (53%). The screen on the left is a board freshly started at level 130.

Hold it against the thresholds and the level 130 opening is just two cells short of 36, where the edges begin to darken. Place a first piece (two or more cells) that makes no match and you are already over the line.

(The table of how many cells are laid out is in the earlier story, TenMaster Numbers.)

Then bricks pile on, one cell at a time. One brick is 1.6% of 64 cells — it looks small, but it is never cleared and only comes off when you finish the level, so the longer you linger on a level, the only direction things move is over the thresholds. Bricks themselves were covered in the earlier brick story; here, just remember that “a brick counts as a filled cell”. The code does not subtract bricks when it measures the ratio.

Back to the screen from the opening. Eight empty cells, 56 filled — 87.5%, so the edges are already nearly at their darkest. The tray on this board:

• One-cell piece — bright. It fits any hole.
• Two-cell piece — dim. There are no two empty cells side by side anywhere on the board.
• 3×3 piece — dim. Needless to say.

The way the code checks “can it be placed” is simple. Every cell of the piece must land on an empty cell, and it tries every position on the board. The number of empty cells does not matter at all. Place the one-cell piece here and both remaining pieces will most likely still be dim, which leaves the sequence below.

The trick to not building a board full of holes is one thing. Do not use one-cell pieces to chew into a big open area — fill the holes that are already isolated first. Empty cells have to touch for a two-cell piece to fit. When holes scatter, the kinds of pieces you can use shrink sharply even if the total number of empty cells is the same.

On the left is a level 70 board with one empty square left over for a 3×3 (the open area and the brick were set up for the shot). In the middle, the piece is lifted over that spot; on the right is the same board with a brick sitting in the centre cell. The rest of the gap is still empty, but the 3×3 now fits nowhere on the board. The earlier story said “from level 70, keep a spot for the 3×3” — and the point of this chapter is that bricks go for that spot first.

Bricks pick their cell by a score

The formula for choosing a brick cell is right there in the code. Every empty cell gets a score, and the brick goes into the highest one.

• Centre score × 1.0 — the four middle cells are 0.86, and it drops by 0.14 for each step away from the centre, down to 0 in the corners.
• Isolation score × 0.6 — starts at 1.0 and loses 0.22 for every brick among the eight surrounding cells. Cells away from existing bricks are better.
• Luck × 0 to 0.55 — a little random is added each time.

So when the middle of the board is empty, the brick almost always goes there. The code’s own explanation is accurate — “an edge brick sits on a cell you rarely use anyway so it doesn’t hurt, while a centre brick splits the board in two.”

The shop’s Time Freeze (70 coins) says it adds 15 seconds to the time left before the next brick drops. As of this writing the code does exactly what it says: it adds 15 seconds and only stops the total from passing 99 seconds. On the screens above, 11 jumped straight to 25 (about a second passes in between, so roughly 15 seconds were added). You can also see the count of items in the bag going from 2 to 1. (In an earlier version the value was clipped to this interval, which in effect just reset the clock.)

• If you use it while the brick warning (last 3 seconds) is showing, the warning is lifted the moment the time passes 3 seconds. A “falling soon” sign next to a longer timer would be a lie.
• One brick is one cell — on a board that is already one cell short, 15 seconds buys you the skip of one brick. That is longer than the 12-second interval at level 1.
• This game has no time limit, so the item does not buy you time to think — it postpones one brick.

Hint — one free move

You get one free per level. Press it and one tray piece and the place to put it light up. By the code, the “best spot” is the one that creates the most matches (sum of 10), and on a tie, the one toward the edge.

On the left is Hint pressed on a board where only the top two rows are open. You can also see that the three-cell vertical piece on the right is dim — with only two rows open there is no column for three in a row. The hint count has become x0, and the icon beside it is the Time Freeze in your bag (2 of them).

Bomb, line clears and Magnet skip bricks. A board blocked by bricks cannot be freed except by the continue bomb. If you had to pick just one tool, at high levels where bricks fall faster Refresh earns its price. It swaps all three pieces at once, so the mismatch between the shape of the empty cells and the shape of the pieces is solved in one go.

When the edges darken, the player who does not hurry wins. This game has no clock, after all.

Not empty cells — the shape of empty cells.
The move that keeps holes from scattering.

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