Decay Match

Swap two adjacent gems to line up three or more of a colour. Matches clear, the board falls and refills, and any new lines cascade, all in one turn. The catch: at the end of every turn, every gem that survived gets one step older and more cracked.

• A gem that reaches maximum age shatters, vanishing and costing you health.
• Older gems score more when cleared, and defusing one just before it shatters earns a bonus.
• Cracked, flashing gems are one turn from breaking, clear those first, not just the easy matches.
• The run ends when your health hits zero; play for the highest score before the board crumbles.

• Desktop: click a gem, then click an adjacent gem to swap them.
• Phone & tablet: tap a gem, then tap a neighbour, the canvas is fully touch-friendly.

• Daily: everyone gets the same seeded board each day to compare scores.
• Practice: a fresh random board any time, with 6×6, 8×8 and 10×10 grid sizes.

• Scan for the oldest gems every turn and route your swaps to include them, even if a younger match looks tidier.
• Build setups that cascade, a single swap that triggers a chain can sweep several aging gems at once.
• Watch the danger counter in the status bar; if too many gems are about to break, prioritise survival over score.

The swap, the clear, the refill and the cascade are all match-three standard, as Bejeweled fixed them.

The original addition is aging: at the end of every turn, every gem that survived gets one step older and more cracked.

That removes the genre's infinite patience. Bejeweled boards will wait forever while you hunt the best move, so the optimal play is always to keep looking; when the board decays around you, a good move made late is worse than an adequate one made now.

Decay Match reimagines the gem-matching genre as a race against entropy, layering an aging-and-shatter system onto classic swap-to-match play. It is an original, free browser game built in-house for PlayPendium.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.