5Gringos

WOOD AND MORE

About this game

5Gringos is a match three puzzle with an unusual rule. You never swap two neighbours and you never tap a single fruit. Instead you take hold of an entire row and slide it sideways, or take hold of an entire column and slide it up and down. The orchard wraps around at every edge, so a fruit pushed off the right side of the board reappears on the left, and a fruit pushed off the bottom climbs back in at the top.

That one rule changes the way you read the board. A line of five is never fixed in place, so a match you cannot see from where the fruit sits now may be one long slide away. Every shift costs one move regardless of how far you dragged, which makes a single well judged slide across four squares far more valuable than four careful nudges.

The orchard is five columns wide and seven rows tall and grows apples, pears, plums, cherries, grapes and figs. Three or more of a kind in a line are picked into your basket, everything above them falls, and fresh fruit rolls in from the top, which often sets off a chain of further clears.

Each round asks for a basket of a certain size within a set number of shifts. Fill it and the round closes with harvest points, including a bonus for shifts you did not need. Fall short and the light goes and you can work that same round again.

Harvest points are spent in the village, where five buildings can be raised, each one changing how the orchard behaves from the next round onward. The mill adds two shifts to every round. The cellar makes every basket worth more. The bakery pays extra for wide clears. The well quietly stirs the orchard whenever no shift can produce a match. The watchtower makes each step of a falling chain far more valuable. All five stand together in a small painted skyline that fills in as you build.

Twelve deeds record your widest clear, your longest chain, the rounds you have reached and the buildings you have raised, and the harvesters screen ranks everything you have ever put in the basket against the other families of the valley.

The game is portrait only, needs no connection, and carries no advertising and no purchases. Settings hold a single clear data option that erases the saved village from this device.

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5Gringos