How to play Color Pop
The board fills with a grid of colored cards. Drag a rectangular box across the board, and every card of the same color caught inside the box pops and scores. You need at least two cards for a valid pop — the selection box glows green when your grab is valid, red when you have mixed colors inside, and blue while it is still empty. Release to pop.
There is no gravity and no refill: popped cards leave permanent holes, and empty gaps are ignored by the box. That is the heart of the puzzle — the holes you open up let later boxes stretch across the board to swallow bigger groups.
Bigger groups are worth far more than small ones. Scoring is quadratic:
| Cards popped | Score |
|---|---|
| 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 6 |
| 4 | 10 |
| 5 | 15 |
| 6 | 21 |
A single six-card pop (21 points) beats seven separate two-card pops. Race to clear as much of the board as you can before the clock hits zero, then chase an even better grade next run.
Modes and grades
Pick Easy, Normal, Hard, or Expert from the start menu — larger boards, more colors, and tighter timers as you climb, up to a sprawling Expert board built for high-score survival. Your best score is saved per difficulty right in your browser. At the end you get a grade from S down to F based on how much of the board you cleared, so a perfect wipe earns the top rank.
Tips and strategy
- Plan the order, not just the pop. Clearing a small group early can trap same-colored cards behind a wall of other colors. If no valid box remains, the game ends in a deadlock — think a move ahead.
- Open lanes on purpose. Popping a column of one color creates a gap your next box can reach through, letting you combine two distant clusters into one huge selection.
- Save the big grabs. When a color is spread out, hold off on tiny pops and build toward a single wide box that sweeps a dozen cards at once.
- Watch the timer chip — it turns red in the final ten seconds. Bank the easy pops first, then gamble on one last sweep.