Kugelblitz: Cosmic Merge

Gravity pulls to the middle. Everything you drop falls inward and piles up. Kugelblitz is a merge game played in a circle instead of a box. There is no floor — a well at the centre of the arena draws every body toward it, so your pile grows outward in every direction at once, and the only thing holding it back is the event horizon ring at the edge. Two bodies of the same kind that touch become the next one up. Dust becomes a pebble. Pebbles become an asteroid, then a comet, a moon, a rocky planet, a gas giant, a brown dwarf, a star. Ten rungs, each one heavier than the last — and heavy things sink. A neutron star dropped onto a bed of dust will burrow its way to dead centre while the dust rides up over it, because mass behaves like mass here. Get two neutron stars to touch and you make a kugelblitz: a black hole born of pure energy. It opens at the point of collapse, drags the entire board into a spiral, stretches every last body out along its fall line, and takes them all with it when it goes. It is the game's reset button and its highest score at the same time. CHAIN YOUR MERGES One drop can set off the next merge, and the next. A chain is one drop's consequences, and the deeper it runs the more each link is worth — up to eight times. The notes climb a scale as it goes, so a long cascade is a melody rather than a pile of blips. ANTIMATTER, FOR WHEN IT JAMS Every pile eventually locks up: a comet stranded in the middle of nothing that matches it. You carry two kinds of charge for exactly that. The small one is a scalpel — it clears the dust and pebbles clogging the gaps and leaves everything from an asteroid up standing. The large one takes an asteroid with it, and a moon if you land it dead centre. Either way the shove matters more than the crater: antimatter scatters a pile far more than it eats it, and a well-aimed charge sets off merges you could not have reached by dropping. NAME WHAT YOU MADE Every rung you reach for the first time gets named, and the ladder under your score fills in as you climb it. Most runs never see a brown dwarf. Very few see two neutron stars in the same arena. - One-handed play: drag around the rim to aim, release to drop - Ten celestial bodies, each with a surface of its own — cratered rock, banded gas, the churn of a star - Every merge answers back, in sound and in your hand, weighted by what you built - A chain climbs a scale as it runs, so a long cascade is a melody - Your best score and your black hole count, kept on your device - No accounts, no ads, no in-app purchases, no network. It works on a plane. Play it slowly. The arena warms as it fills.