Boulder Bash: Mine Match 3

Swing a pickaxe, light the fuse, and bring the whole seam down.

Boulder Bash is a match-3 puzzle game with rock under its fingernails. Match three or more boulders to smash them, chain the cascades, and build the blasting gear you need: dynamite, pickaxes and colour charges. Put two of them together and something much louder happens.

100 LEVELS ACROSS FIVE DIGS

• Mountain Mine — learn the tools: colours, specials, cracked rock, ice and ore
• Arctic Dig — frozen boulders that will not move until you break them out
• Fossil Beds — multi-cell fossils, uncovered all at once or not at all
• Sunken Trench — water that spreads across the board while you work
• Volcano — lava that destroys cells outright, and the board gets smaller

THE BLASTING GEAR

• Dynamite — match four in a line, clear a 3x3
• Pickaxe — match an L or a T, clear a whole row or column
• Colour charge — match five, wipe every boulder of one colour off the board
• Combine any two of them: a 5x5 blast, a cross three cells thick, every red boulder detonating at once, or the whole board cleared in a single move

Chain reactions are on. One special setting off another setting off another is the best thing in the game, and nothing is capped to keep it tidy.

BUILT TO BE PLAYED ON A PHONE

Portrait, one thumb, no tutorial you cannot skip. Effects can be turned down for older hardware. Every boulder colour has its own shape as well as its own colour, so red and green are never told apart by hue alone.

YOUR PROGRESS, WHERE YOU LEFT IT

Earn 48 Google Play achievements as you work through the mine. If you use a Google Play Games profile, your stars, coins and achievements follow you between Android devices with Saved Games.

There is no separate Boulder Bash account, and the whole game still plays offline — a plane, a tunnel or a basement is fine.

One optional purchase removes the ads between levels. It is a one-off, not a subscription, and it is the only thing in the game that costs real money. Coins are earned by making progress, never by repeating the easiest level, so there is nothing to grind.

Rewarded videos stay opt-in and stay available whether you have paid or not: watch one for a life or a few more moves, or ignore them entirely.

Five lives. You lose one when a dig collapses on you, and get one back every thirty minutes.

Dig in.