anekdote

anekdote is where I put the things I build in my own time. The rule I hold myself to is one idea, done properly, rather than a large one done roughly: no accounts, no onboarding, nothing that needs explaining before you can use it. Open the page and the thing works.

About the game

TenUp deals a grid of digits from 1 to 9 and asks you to take them off two at a time. A pair comes off if the two numbers are the same, or if they add up to ten — and if they are connected, which means either sitting next to each other when you read the board like a page, or seeing each other along a row, column or diagonal with nothing but empty squares in between.

That second rule is the whole game. Cleared squares stop blocking, so the board keeps opening up as you play, and a pair that was impossible ten seconds ago becomes the obvious move. It is the kind of puzzle you can hold entirely in your head, which is why it survives being played in a queue with one thumb.

The full rules, with worked examples of the wrap and the straight-line case, live on the how to play page. If you already know the rules and want to stop losing levels, the strategy guide is the one to read — it covers the counting trick that tells you, before you make a single move, whether the board you have been dealt can be cleared at all.

Reading

How to get good at TenUp — the parity rule that decides whether a level is winnable, why an add always resets it, when to spend your five adds, and how the scoring rewards finishing a level without them.

Elsewhere

If something here is broken, or you have a suggestion, write to [email protected]. I read everything, and bug reports about TenUp are especially welcome — it is easier to fix a puzzle when someone tells you exactly which board went wrong.