a Soothing Version of Tetris

A decade ago the world was cursed with a version of Tetris called Hatetris that frustrated players by delivering the worst possible tetromino piece imaginable. Eleven years and a pandemic later, we now have a version called Lovetris that does the exact opposite: dropping the exact piece a player needs to clear a line.

On its own Tetris can be both a satisfying and frustrating experience, occasionally dropping you a straight line piece exactly when you’re ready to clear four lines, or delivering those cursed ‘Z’ pieces one after another forcing you to bury incomplete lines you’ll hopefully be able to dig out and deal with later. The unpredictable challenge is what makes the game so addictive, but sometimes that’s not what you’re after. For those times when you’re in desperate need of a win, playing Lovetris is like giving an addled brain a soothing massage.

Whereas Hatetris used a simple AI to choose the next piece to drop by testing all of the possible tetrominoes in all of the possible locations in the stack to determine which would provide the worst outcome, Lovetris instead uses an AI to determine which piece provides the best chance to clear a line and reduce the height of your ever-growing tower. It’s like Tetris with training wheels, which many of us need right now, but Lovetris does come with its own unique challenge: namely trying to actually build up a four-layer tower to complete an actual Tetris (the proper name for when you clear four lines at a time) because the AI is focused on dependently clearing single lines. If that sounds equally frustrating, you can always hack the game’s source code to make the AI do exactly what you need.