Candy Crush

Candy Crush is the match-three game that defined the genre for a decade, and it is still the clearest explanation of why the format works. It runs in the browser — no download, no account, no install.

The rule is one sentence long: swap two adjacent sweets so that three or more of the same colour line up. They disappear, the candies above fall into the gap, and the board settles into a new configuration. Every move therefore creates the next puzzle, which is the engine the whole genre runs on — you are never solving a static board, you are managing a board that keeps changing under you.

Connections are where the skill concentrates. Four in a row makes a striped candy that clears a line; five makes a colour bomb that removes every one of a single colour; combinations collapse whole sections of the board at once. Learning which arrangements are worth setting up rather than taking immediately is the difference between clearing a level and running out of moves.

It is designed for a phone in portrait, and the mouse versions work identically.

On cool games spot this page is the index entry: cover, description, and search terms. The game itself is loaded from a third-party web build in an iframe on Play, so nothing is bundled into the site. It is filed under arcade and tagged match-3 and puzzle, so it appears alongside the rest of the match-3 games in the catalog.

Press Play and find out.