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Arrow to a column, r to rotate, space to drop.
0 fragments
longest chain — / 12 to win
fragments are unstable — they topple and scatter
You drop oligonucleotide fragments of one to three bases and rotate them before they land.
Rotating a vertical triplet 180° reverses its reading order — AUG becomes
GUA, Met becomes Val. A fragment balanced on a spire topples and scatters its codon
across three columns, and loose bases knocked loose by a merge roll into whatever gap they can
reach. All of it is deterministic, and the dashed outline shows exactly where everything ends up.
Each piece is one, two or three linked bases. A vertical triplet is a whole codon in a single placement — if you can land it on level ground.
A column is read from the floor upward, so the bottom base of a vertical fragment is its 5′ end.
Rotate it 180° and the read reverses: AUG (Met) becomes GUA (Val). This is the
direction tactic the plain drop mode gives up, handed back as a rotation. Rotate to horizontal and the
three bases go into three different columns instead.
A one-tile-wide spire standing two or more clear of its neighbours is not a stable thing to balance a fragment on. It tips into the lower side, lands flat, and scatters its codon across three columns. The dashed outline tells you before you commit — so keep the terrain level if you want to use triplets.
A tile at rest stays at rest: towers do not collapse on their own. But a tile knocked into motion — by a merge removing what held it up — keeps going, and scatters sideways into whatever gap it can reach rather than balancing on a peak. It cannot pass through a wall to get there. A nascent chain is held by the ribosome and only ever falls straight.
Three bases in frame translate through the real genetic code; a residue elongates the chain below it if they share a biochemical class; equal chains ligate; a stop codon or a release factor terminates a chain and banks it for length² × class rarity. Cascades run at ×1.5, ×2, ×2.5.
Every bit of the physics is deterministic, and the preview runs the real simulation on a copy of the board rather than guessing at it — an earlier version reasoned about the resting positions separately and got them wrong, which is the one thing a preview must never do. Randomness that arrives before your decision is a puzzle; randomness that arrives after it is noise.