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The Overburden app icon: a row of blocks mid-clear, flashing white across the centre.
OverburdeniPhone · iOS 26

Block puzzle that pushes back.

Everyone gets the same Daily board, so scores actually compare. The rubble clock tightens from every six pieces to every two, and one good chain buys the room back.

Not released yet

Not on the App Store yet. The build is in TestFlight and the store listing is being prepared.

Overburden mid-run: a CHAIN x3 banner reading 1 LINE, +900 over a board of orange, purple and teal blocks, with grey rubble along the bottom rows.
A ×3 chain, and the rubble it bought back
Sec. 01 — How it plays

Fill a line, and the board comes apart.

An 8×10 grid and three pieces at a time. Drag one onto the board; it never rotates.

Fill a row or a column and it clears. What happens next is the game. Everything still standing falls, and connected blocks fall together as a body — a body that can come apart on the way down.

Material lands where it did not start, completes lines you never planned, and one placement becomes ×2, ×3, sometimes ×5. Chains reach ×5, and now and then ×6.

While a piece is in your hand, every line it would clear lights up — so a chain is something you can aim at rather than something that happens to you.

A yellow five-block piece held over the board, with the row it would clear lit up beneath it.
The clear preview, while the piece is still in hand
Sec. 02 — The clock

Rubble is the pressure and the ammunition.

Grey rubble pushes up from the bottom on a clock that tightens the longer you last: every six pieces at first, every two by the end.

It clears exactly like any other block, which is the whole bargain — the thing burying you is also the thing you complete lines with. You lose when it reaches the top row, or when none of your three pieces fit anywhere.

A board stacked past the dashed red danger line, the rubble clock badge turned red, and blocks reaching the second row from the top.
Above the danger line, with the clock in the red
Sec. 03 — Daily and Endless

The same board as everyone else.

Daily gives every player the same sequence of pieces, and it rotates at your local midnight. Your score and someone else's are about the same board, which is the only thing that makes a score worth comparing.

Share a link to today's board and it opens in an App Clip — whoever you sent it to plays that board without installing anything.

Endless is a fresh random run, whenever you want one.

The in-game settings sheet: Daily and Endless mode buttons, Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty, and sound and haptics toggles.
Daily or Endless, and three tiers
The App Clip playing today's Daily board, headed OVERBURDEN — Today's Daily, with no install prompt in the way.
The App Clip, playing a shared day
Sec. 04 — Three tiers, measured

The difficulty numbers are not guesses.

They come out of 400 simulated games per tier, played through the same engine that runs on your phone.

Median run length and deep-chain rate per difficulty tier, measured over 400 simulated games each
TierMedian run×3 or deeper
Easy121 pieces33% of runs
Medium65 pieces25% of runs
Hard36 pieces22% of runs

The board, the piece set and the scoring never change between tiers. What changes is how fast the rubble comes — and how runs end changes with it. On Easy most runs end with nowhere left to put a piece; on Hard most end buried.

Sec. 05 — What it does not do

Nothing leaves the phone.

Not a promise — the app contains no networking code at all, which is checkable in the source rather than taken on trust.

  • No account, and nothing to sign in to
  • No network calls of any kind
  • No ads and no in-app purchases
  • No tracking and no analytics
  • The Daily works in aeroplane mode

The Daily is arithmetic on the date, not a download, which is why it works in aeroplane mode. Nothing is collected, so there is nothing to leak, sell or lose. The privacy policy says the same thing at length.

Sec. 06 — Getting it

Built for iOS 26. iPhone, portrait, one hand.

Not released yet

Not on the App Store yet. The build is in TestFlight and the store listing is being prepared.