How to play Melon Drop — Fruit Merge Puzzle

Melon Drop is a merge game played inside a physics simulation, and almost everything interesting about it comes from that second half. The fruit are not tiles on a grid. They have size and weight, they roll, they settle into gaps, and they push each other around.

The ladder

There are eleven fruit. In order: cherry, strawberry, grape, satsuma, persimmon, apple, pear, peach, pineapple, honeydew, melon. Each is about a fifth wider than the one below it, so two of anything are visibly the next thing up — you can read the ladder off the screen without being told it.

Only the first five ever arrive from the top. Everything above a persimmon exists only because you made it.

Merging

Two fruit merge when they are the same kind and they are touching. That is the entire condition. There is no matching move to make, no button to press; you place fruit and the jar does the rest.

The new fruit appears where the two that made it were, carrying their momentum, and it is a whole tier larger than either. Two consequences follow, and they are the game:

First, a merge takes up more room than it frees, in the sense that matters. Two grapes occupy two grape-sized spaces in different places; one satsuma occupies one satsuma-sized space in the middle. The pile does not get shorter in the way you expect.

Second, a merge can chain. The new fruit may be touching a third of its own kind the instant it appears, and then that merges too, and so on. A chain looks like the jar collapsing in on itself, and it is the best thing that can happen to you.

Scoring

Every merge scores, and the value goes up faster than the ladder does. Making one pear is worth more than the four satsumas it took, which is why the game rewards building deliberately rather than merging whatever happens to touch.

Your score is the sum of every merge you caused. Fruit sitting in the jar unmerged are worth nothing at all.

Ending the run

The dashed line near the top is the fill limit, and the rule about it is more forgiving than it looks. A fruit is only counted once it has landed and come to rest, and then only after it has sat above the line for a full second.

This matters because every fruit you drop passes through the line on its way down — that is where fruit come from. A game that ended the moment anything crossed the line would end on the first drop. What ends the run is a pile that has genuinely settled too high, and by the time it does you will have watched it happen.

The physics, and why it rewards patience

Fruit have mass proportional to their size, so a melon arriving among cherries will barge them aside and a cherry landing on a melon will roll off it. Nothing rotates, but everything slides, and a fruit that lands on the shoulder of a bigger one will slide down until it finds somewhere to sit.

That sliding is the part worth learning. Dropping a fruit directly onto its partner often fails, because it lands on top and rolls off the far side. Dropping it beside its partner, so that it slides in, works far more often. The jar walls help: a fruit dropped against a wall has only one direction to go.

Seeds and sharing

Every run is dealt from a seed, and the seed decides the entire sequence of fruit before you touch anything. The same seed always deals the same fruit in the same order.

This is what makes a shared run worth sharing. When you send someone a challenge link they do not get a game like yours, they get the fruit you got, in the order you got them, and their score means the same thing as yours. The physics is not claimed to be identical down to the last decimal on a different device — but the hand you were dealt is, and that is what the comparison rests on.