Bubble Match

What is Bubble Match?

Colorful bubbles are scattered around. Any movement nearby sweeps bubbles along — herd two bubbles of the same color into each other and they flow together into one bigger bubble; finished colors are marked with a green ✓ and locked in place so you can focus on what's left. Every merge scores points, quick back-to-back merges earn chain bonuses, and finishing off a color pays a completion bonus — your best score is saved per mode. HARD mode adds purple as a fifth color and bumps each color to five bubbles.

The badge in Bubble Match

There is one badge here, kept on your own device and shown on the 🏆 Achievements panel on the home page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account to make.

• Match Maker — Finish a Bubble Match round.

How to play Bubble Match

1. Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks. Nothing installs.
2. Sixteen bubbles in four colors sit scattered across the picture, and a three-second countdown runs before they can be moved. Nothing new arrives; those sixteen are the puzzle.
3. Sweep to herd. Take an arm past a bubble and it slides away from you, the way something slides across a table under the back of your hand.
4. Or take hold of one. Bring a hand close to a single bubble and it picks up a white ring — that one follows your hand instead of being shoved. Only one bubble ever wears the ring.
5. Bring two of the same color together until they properly overlap. The smaller flows into the larger, and what is left is one bigger bubble.
6. The counter top right tracks how many colors are done — 1/4 colors, then 2/4. When the last one is down to a single bubble the round ends by itself. SPACE plays again, H goes home, M silences the music.

If nothing on the board reacts, the room is too dim for the camera to see a hand move against the background. A lamp helps more than daylight from behind.

Two ways to move a bubble, and they pull opposite ways

• The sweep pushes away from you. It reaches about twice as far as the ring does, and everything loose inside that reach slides off in the direction you were going. So you herd from behind: get on the far side and push a bubble toward its partner rather than dragging it.
• The ring pulls with you. The nearest bubble within a couple of bubble-widths of your hand takes the ring and tracks you, holding on until you have moved about half as far again away. It is the tool for the last few inches, where a sweep would scatter the line you just spent ten seconds building.
• The ring reads one point, and two people split it. It goes to the middle of everything moving in the picture: one hand puts it where that hand is, two children waving put it between them, following neither. For the ring, one at a time. Sweeping has no such problem.
• Matching colors finish the job for you. Two bubbles of one color within roughly three bubble-widths start easing together on their own. Get them that close and stop — pushing further sends one past the other.
• They have to overlap, not touch. Two can sit rim to rim indefinitely. They join at about a third of a bubble deep into each other, a firmer nudge than it looks.

A hand parked beside a bubble does nothing in either layer — it is the travel that counts. Bubbles drifting toward the edge get eased back in, so nothing strands in a corner.

Scoring when there is no clock

Nothing is counting down. The round lasts as long as it takes, and the end screen tells you afterwards how long that was.

Most of the score is fixed before you start. Four bubbles becoming one takes three joins, so every round is twelve joins however you play it, and each is worth ten. Finishing a color pays a bonus that grows as you go — 25 for the first color home, then 50, then 75, then 100. A round that simply gets done, at any pace, scores 370.

Everything above that comes from one thing: joins landing within two and a half seconds of the one before. Each step of a run is worth five more than the last — fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five — and CHAIN ×3! flashes across the middle as it builds. If all twelve joins landed back to back the total would be 700. That gap, 370 to 700, is the whole game.

So it rewards looking ahead rather than hurrying. The place to be is a patch of board where three or four colors have collected together, because one sweep through it can set off several joins in a row, and lining up the next pair while the current one is still closing beats finishing one color cleanly and only then looking for the next. The board helps a little as you go: the survivor grows every time, so each join of a set is a fatter target than the last.

Hard mode is a bigger board, not a faster one

Purple joins as a fifth color and every color gets five bubbles instead of four: twenty-five on screen rather than sixteen. Nothing speeds up. There is no clock in either mode, and the sweep, the ring and the join distance are unchanged.

What changes is the arithmetic and the crowding. Twenty joins instead of twelve lifts the guaranteed floor to 575, and with five bubbles to a color it is common to find three of one already sitting near each other, which makes long runs easier to find and pushes the ceiling well above Normal's. So it is the mode for a child who has worked out that runs are where the points are. Best scores are kept separately, so switching over never overwrites a Normal record.

What a grown-up should know

• There is nothing to fail. No clock, no lives, no penalty for a wrong move. The board only ever gets smaller and every join is permanent, so the worst a bad sweep costs is a few seconds of re-herding. Walk away and everything stops within a second.
• The length is the child's, not the game's. It ends when the board is clean, so this is not the one to start two minutes before you leave the house. Bubble Pop, which always runs a single minute, is.
• It needs less space than a timed game. Small deliberate movements are the skill, and it plays fine sitting at a desk with one hand. Whole-body flailing works against you, because a big sweep scatters the pair you had just lined up.
• It is quieter. A short rising chime per join, a bigger three-note one per color finished, and background music. M mutes the music.
• Listed from about four, and sweeping alone is enough to finish it. A young child who only flaps at the screen still completes every color, because the sweep and the way matching colors drift together do the work between them. The ring rewards a child old enough to move slowly and watch, so a four-year-old and a nine-year-old do visibly different things with the same controls. One finished round unlocks the Match Maker badge.

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