FAQ — Pair Buddies

No. There's no target tile to hit — the game never ends on a "you won" screen. Play until the board fills and no moves are possible, or until your 100 moves run out in Sprint mode. The goal is simply to climb as high as you can and see which buddy you can reach.

Eighteen total, organized into three groups in Settings → Display → Color Scheme.

Fun — six character themes where every tile value gets its own kawaii artwork: Kittens (distinct cat breeds), Puppies (dog breeds with floppy or upright ears), Fruits & Veg (produce with botanical toppers and blinking faces), Undersea (goldfish, clownfish, blue fish, sea turtle, jellyfish, and more), Cosmos (icy moon, cratered moon, orange planet, dark moon, ringed planet, and more), and Blossoms (daisy, violet, sunflower, poppy, peony, and more).

Classic Tiles — nine color-only palettes: Classic, Moody Blue, Fiery Red, Natural Green, Cotton Candy, Neon Arcade, Sandstorm, Midnight Plum, and Grayscale.

Accessible — High Contrast, Deuteranopia (blue/amber, safe for red-green color blindness), and Tritanopia (red/teal, safe for blue-yellow color blindness).

Switch any time in Settings — no new game required.

Three rare wildcards can appear on the board, each changing one interaction when it meets a normal tile.

Square (ײ) — crimson tile with a pulsing red border. Squares whatever it touches (8 → 64). Consumed on use.

Halve (÷2) — bright green tile with a pulsing yellow border. Halves whatever it touches, rounded down to a minimum of 1 (128 → 64, 7 → 3). Consumed on use.

Wildcard — a rainbow-shimmer tile with a sparkle icon. Doubles any normal tile it merges with (Wildcard + 16 → 32). Does not interact with Square, Halve, other Wildcards, or Blockers. Consumed on merge.

If a Square and a Halve meet each other, both are removed with no score.

Square tiles spawn at 1-in-2,049 odds per move. Wildcard tiles at 1-in-2,024. Halve tiles at 1-in-24. All three checks run before the normal tile spawn — a move that spawns a special tile never also spawns a normal or bonus tile. Wildcards can be toggled off independently; Square and Halve share a toggle.

Normal tiles usually spawn as a 2 (or 1 in Start-at-1 mode). Bonus tiles are rare higher-value spawns marked with a gold border. No bonus tile can exceed the current largest tile on the board. Toggle them off in Settings → Gameplay if you prefer pure 2-tile spawns.

Four contiguous cells in a row or column whose values form a strict doubling run in either direction — like 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32, 16, 8, 4. When one is present, any swipe collapses those four tiles into a single tile worth four times the largest value (16 → 64), placed where the largest tile was.

The collapse fires on every swipe even if the slide itself moves nothing, so a board whose only legal action is a Straight is not game over. In Sprint mode, each Straight refunds 2 moves. Straights can be turned off in Settings → Gameplay.

Rare immovable obstacle tiles (stone-gray background, countdown number, lock icon). A Blocker sits in its cell for twelve moves and splits any row or column it occupies into two independent slide lanes — tiles on either side slide and merge without crossing it.

The border flashes orange when three moves remain. At zero the Blocker crumbles with a particle burst. At most two Blockers exist on the board at a time. Toggle them off in Settings → Gameplay.

You start each game with three undo charges, shown as dots next to the undo button. Each use spends one charge and fully reverses the previous move — board, score, and merge state. When charges are gone, undo is unavailable until you earn more.

You earn one charge back (capped at three) each time you merge a tile value you haven't reached before in that game. Hitting milestones and undoing wisely keeps your charge count healthy.

A fixed-length variant that ends after 100 moves regardless of board state. A counter above the board tracks remaining moves. Each Straight collapse refunds 2 moves, so playing for Straights extends your run.

Sprint scores are stored separately from unlimited games so the two leaderboards don't interfere with each other.

All spawned tiles appear as 1 instead of 2. The math is the same — two matching buddies merge — but you build every value from the ground up. 1 + 1 = 2, then 2 + 2 = 4, and so on. It's a harder, slower game. Start-at-1 scores rank separately from Normal games.

An alternative opening available at the start of every new game. Instead of two tiles on an empty board, roughly a quarter of the cells are pre-filled with random low-value buddies. The board begins in a lively mid-game state with plenty of empties still available for a valid first move.

Scores are grouped by the exact settings combination active when the game was played: board size, game mode (Normal / Start-at-1 / Sprint), bonus tiles on/off, special tiles on/off, Wildcards on/off, Straights on/off, and Blockers on/off. A game played with Blockers off ranks separately from one played with Blockers on, even on the same board size. This keeps each leaderboard section a fair like-for-like comparison.

All data is stored locally on your device. Nothing is sent to a server or synced to iCloud. Deleting the app removes all stored data. There is no account system.

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