Pressing up results in a hard drop, which instantly places the piece below its current position. Pressing down allows you to soft drop, which speeds up the current pace of your falling tetromino. You can also manually drop your blocks faster, regardless of the game’s speed. Also the better you play, the faster the blocks drop. It makes the game infinitely replayable because the order radically changes what you can do next. The order in which you receive blocks is completely random. When a line is filled with blocks, all those lines clear Arika/Nintendo via Polygon To better understand how to do that, it helps to know the game’s basic mechanics. To play longer and get higher scores, you need to creatively stack your blocks and remove as many lines as possible with each piece you lay down. If you run out of space and can no longer place any more tetrominoes, you top out and the game is over. To do that, you need to fill an entire line horizontally with blocks, causing those lines to disappear and giving you more space to stack. Your goal is to continually stack tetrominoes and clear lines as long as you can. The Tetris playing field is a 10x20 grid. Tetris foundations: What you need to know first But before you get started, it’s time to set up your foundations. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with these factors, you’ll need to practice, practice, practice. The key to mastering any version of Tetris lies in a few areas: creating foundational knowledge for how Tetris works, learning the basic strategy behind good Tetris play, and practicing advanced strategies to become better. We spoke with Jonas Neubauer, seven-time winner of the Classic Tetris World Championship, to help you get your skills in order. Unless you’re a Tetris champion, this journey has probably been a difficult one for you. Whether you first started playing the game on your IBM PC in 1987, 2018’s dazzling Tetris Effect, or the battle royale-esque Tetris 99 you’ve likely spent hours trying to master how to get all of the game’s blocks, or tetrominoes, in place. Tetris has epitomized the “easy to learn difficult to master” design principle for over 30 years.

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