How to play Tray Match

Tray Match is a triple-matching puzzle. Tiles are piled in overlapping layers, you take the ones that nothing is covering, and every tile you take goes into a tray of seven slots. Any three of a kind clear together the instant the third arrives.

The pressure is entirely in the tray. It does not empty on its own and there is no timer — the only thing that can end a board is seven tiles sitting in it with no set among them.

Covering

A tile can be taken only when nothing on a higher layer overlaps it. Layers alternate on a half-square offset, which is what makes the pile read as a heap rather than as several separate boards stacked neatly, and it means one tile frequently pins two or three below it.

Takeable tiles are drawn bright and covered ones dimmed, so the board always shows you what is available. Tapping a covered tile shakes it rather than silently doing nothing — a tap that vanishes reads as a broken game rather than as a blocked tile.

Why the tray is seven, and why every board can be cleared

This is the part that is easy to get wrong, and it is worth explaining because it is what makes the lose state fair.

A game you can lose is only fair if losing was avoidable. If a board simply could not be cleared with seven slots, the game would be blaming you for the generator. So the boards are not dealt at random and hoped over — the symbols are assigned by playing the board out in advance. The generator repeatedly picks three tiles that are free at that moment, stamps them as a matching set, and removes them, until every tile has a symbol.

Replaying that same order — not reversed; each set is free exactly when its turn arrives — clears the entire pile, and it never holds more than three tiles at once, because the third tile of each set clears it immediately. So the seven slots you are given are more than twice what a flawless run needs.

That gap is the point. Four slots of headroom is the room you have to be wrong in, and the whole game is spending it carefully.

What the difficulty actually is

The boards grow, and the number of different symbols grows, and neither of those is quite the same as getting harder.

Each candidate board was played out many times by two automatic players: a careless one, which completes a set when it can and otherwise takes anything, and an attentive one, which prefers symbols it already holds or can see more of. The useful number is not how often either loses but the ratio between them — how much attention is worth.

On the boards that made the final ladder that ratio runs between roughly two and four: careless play loses several times more often than careful play. On the two largest, busiest boards tried it collapsed towards one, meaning they beat everybody about equally. Those are not harder puzzles, they are punishment, and they were dropped. The ladder therefore tops out at a large stack with fewer symbols rather than a large stack with many.

Reading a stack

The symbols are shapes first and colours second — six polygons, each either solid or hollow — so the pile still reads if the hues are hard to tell apart.

Two habits matter. The first is to count before you take: if three of a symbol are visible and free, that set is safe and can be taken whenever you like, so it is worth leaving until the tray is under pressure. A symbol you can see only one of is the opposite — taking it commits a slot with no idea when the other two will surface.

The second is to think about what a tile uncovers rather than what it is. Taking the tile that frees three others is usually worth more than taking one that matches something already in your tray, because the whole difficulty of the endgame is running out of choices while holding singletons.

The daily tray

One stack a day, the same for everybody, built from the date. Clearing it extends your streak, your best time is kept, and the share text says whether you cleared it and how long it took without describing the layout.