Why I Built a Block Puzzle Solver (and What It Taught Me)

I’ve always been fascinated by simple games with deep logic. You know the kind — easy to learn, impossible to master. For me, that game was Block Blast, a tile-matching puzzle where you fit shapes into a grid, clear lines, and try to survive as long as possible.

On the surface, it’s a casual time-passer. But once I started playing seriously, I realized there was a layer of decision-making I couldn’t quite crack by intuition alone. I’d stare at the board, unsure whether to place a block here or there, whether to clear a line now or set up a bigger combo later.

So I did what any developer would do: I stopped playing and started coding.

I wanted to understand the optimal move — not to cheat, but to learn. I built a solver in JavaScript that uses a simple greedy algorithm: evaluate all possible placements for the next block, score each based on remaining space and potential future moves, then pick the best one.

Turns out, even a basic algorithm can teach you a lot.

What the Solver Showed Me
Space is a resource. The solver almost never fills a corner early. It treats empty cells as future options, not just absence.

Combos aren’t everything. Sometimes it’s better to delay a line clear to keep the board flexible.

“Perfect” moves are rare. Often, there are 3–4 placements with nearly identical scores. Overthinking can be the real enemy.

Why I Kept Going
This started as a weekend experiment, but it grew into something more — a way to visualize board states, test strategies, and see the game as a system of constraints rather than just shapes on a screen.

I’m still refining it, adding a better scoring heuristic, maybe even a minimax lookahead. But the biggest win wasn’t a higher score; it was seeing the puzzle through two lenses at once: as a player feeling the tension of the next move, and as a programmer tracing the logic behind it.

If you’ve ever reverse-engineered a game or built a tool just to understand a system better, you know the feeling. It’s not about solving the puzzle — it’s about solving how to solve it.