Bloom now has four ways to play

Bloom started as a single flood-fill puzzle. Fill a 14×14 grid in as few moves as possible. That core is still there — but we've now added three new modes, each one changing a fundamental part of how you play.

Classic and Seed were the foundation.

Classic (levels 1–60) is pure flood-fill. No tricks. The only question is which colour order minimises your move count. Seed (levels 61–120) pre-colours a handful of tiles and starts your territory from those positions instead of the corner — which completely changes your opening.

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Then we tried to go further. A few ideas didn't survive.

We experimented with Catalyst — tiles that would chain-react when absorbed, pulling in neighbours of the same colour. It looked clever on paper. In practice, flood-fill already absorbs connected same-colour tiles automatically, so the Catalyst did nothing players could see or feel. Scrapped.

We tried Barrier — tiles that only opened when surrounded by the right colour. The unlock condition was so easy to satisfy naturally that barriers opened on their own before players noticed them. Scrapped.

We went through Gravity (rotating grid), Spinner (rotating 3×3 zones), and Magnet (absorb all of one colour at once). Each one either had no strategic impact or made the game feel random rather than skill-based.

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What shipped: Virus and Token.

Virus 🦠 (levels 121–180) adds a 7th fuchsia colour that spreads by one tile after every move you make. Do you absorb it early for a small safe cluster, or let it grow and collect more tiles in one move? The risk-reward timing is the whole game within the game.

Token 🔢 (levels 181–240) gives each colour a limited number of uses. Run out of a colour while it still exists on the board and you lose. Unlike everything else in Bloom, Token forces you to plan the entire game before your first click. The move-by-move improvisation that works in Classic gets you eliminated here.

Both modes are live now in Levels.

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How the par system works

Every Bloom level has a par — the number of moves an optimal solver needs to clear the grid. Par is calculated using a greedy algorithm that picks the colour absorbing the most new cells on each turn. It is not perfect, but it is a consistent, honest target.

Classic and Seed levels are tuned so par sits between 18 and 26 moves depending on difficulty. Virus par accounts for the virus growing during the simulation — absorbing it at the right moment is baked into the target score. Token par is the tightest: the solver counts exact colour usage, then adds a small buffer so players have room to manoeuvre without being punished for a single suboptimal click.

Matching par earns a Perfect Bloom and the full 10,000 points. Each move over par costs points. The scoring bands — Learning to Grow, Decent Bloom, Clean Bloom, Perfect Bloom — are the same across all four modes.

What makes a good Bloom opening

The first two or three moves decide most of the game. In Classic, you want to identify the dominant colour cluster touching the top-left corner and absorb it immediately — this gives you the largest possible territory before the board gets complicated.

In Seed mode the opening is different. Your territory starts scattered across the board at seed positions, so the first priority is connecting those islands rather than expanding outward.

In Virus mode the opening question is: where is the virus, and how fast is it growing toward a region I need? If the virus is sitting next to a large same-colour cluster, letting it grow for two moves could save you several moves later. If it is isolated in a corner, ignore it until you have nothing better to do.

Token mode changes the opening entirely. Before your first click, scan the board and estimate how many times you will need each colour. If terracotta dominates the grid, you will use it eight or nine times — and you have twelve tokens. If sage appears only in two small patches, you probably need it once, and you have four tokens. Spot the colour with the tightest margin before you start.

The levels

All 240 levels are hand-seeded using a deterministic random generator, so the same level number always produces the same grid. Difficulty scales gradually within each set of 60: early levels have generous par targets and forgiving layouts, later levels require near-optimal play to hit par.

Levels do not reset and there is no time pressure. You can return to a level as many times as you like. Your best score per level is saved locally — no account needed.

Coming next

Bloom has four modes now. Palette, Sortl, and the other Stoop games are getting similar treatment — more depth within the same familiar format. Same daily puzzle, more ways to go further if you want to.