Stack, clear and level up in Tetris
Arrow keys move, ↑ rotates, space hard-drops · or tap the board.
Tetris is the timeless block-stacking puzzle: seven tetromino shapes fall one at a time, and you rotate and slide each into place to pack solid rows. Complete a line and it vanishes — but the blocks fall faster every level, so read the next piece, keep the stack flat and see how long you can last.
How to play
Tetris in 4 steps
Move the piece
Slide each falling tetromino left or right with the arrow keys (or the on-screen buttons) to line it up over the gap you want to fill.
Rotate to fit
Press up — or tap the board — to spin the piece through its four orientations so it nests neatly into the stack.
Clear full lines
Fill an entire row with no gaps and it clears, dropping everything above it and adding to your score. Clear up to four at once for a "Tetris".
Don't top out
Pieces fall faster as you level up. The game ends the moment the stack reaches the top, so keep it low and flat.
Controls
- Arrow ← →
- Move the piece left / right
- Arrow ↑ / X
- Rotate the piece
- Arrow ↓
- Soft drop (fall faster)
- Space
- Hard drop (slam down)
- P
- Pause / resume
- Tap / swipe
- Rotate / move / drop (touch)
Strategy
Tips to play better
Keep the stack flat
A bumpy, towering pile leaves no room to manoeuvre. Build low and level so almost any incoming piece has a clean home.
Save the line piece
Leave one column on the edge open and drop the long I-piece straight in for a four-line clear — the highest-scoring move in the game.
Hard-drop when set
Once a piece is lined up, slam it down with space. It scores extra and buys you a beat to plan before the next one falls.
Read the next piece
Glance at the Next preview and plan two moves ahead, placing the current piece so the one coming up also has somewhere to go.
About Tetris
Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The name fuses the Greek "tetra" (four — every piece is made of four squares) with "tennis", his favourite sport. It spread from computer to computer by hand, jumped the Iron Curtain, and became one of the best-selling and most-ported video games ever made.
Its hold over players is almost mathematical. The rules fit in a sentence, yet the game is a relentless exercise in spatial planning under mounting time pressure — every piece you place changes the board for the next, and a single greedy move can cost you the whole stack. That tight loop of plan, place, clear and repeat is what makes "just one more game" so hard to resist.
This Unicode edition renders the playfield, the falling pieces and the cleared-line flash entirely from glowing block characters on a neon grid — no images, no sprites. It runs smoothly on phone, tablet or desktop with keyboard, touch and on-screen controls, and your best score is saved locally in your browser between sessions.
FAQ
Tetris questions
How do I rotate the pieces?
What is a "Tetris"?
Does the game get faster?
Is my high score saved?
Is it really free?
Keep playing