How to Play

PopGrab is a colour-matching game where the board plays your music. Every pop sounds a note of a tune you wrote.

The basics

The board is 6 columns by 7 rows — 42 tiles in four to seven colours. Tap any tile and every same-coloured tile connected to it pops together. Tiles above fall into the gap, and empty columns close up, so the board keeps rearranging itself under you.

Bigger groups are worth more. A tile in a group scores 10 points; a tile with no matching neighbour scores 4. Clear five or more at once and it counts as a big combo.

A normal round lasts 60 seconds. There is a three-second countdown first, so nothing starts while your thumb is still moving.

The modes

Quick Pop

The standard timed round. Scores, Sparks and XP all count, and your best goes to the leaderboard.
Daily Challenge

One board a day, the same for everyone, played to a fixed melody rather than your own tune.
Practice

No clock, no score, no rewards. A board to think on without spending a round.
Playhead

A rhythm mode. A playhead sweeps the board and you pop in time with it, building a chain for as long as you stay on the beat.

Sparks, XP and levels

Finishing a round that pays out earns Sparks — roughly your score divided by ten, and never fewer than four. XP comes with them, and each level needs about a quarter more XP than the one before, starting at 60.

Tiers and power-ups

Levels group into ten tiers. Reaching a new tier adds a colour to the board — up to a maximum of seven — and unlocks a power-up you can use once per round.

Tier	Levels	Power-up
Bubblegum	1–4	—
Sherbet	5–9	Bomb Tile — pops a random 3×3 block
Lemon Drop	10–14	Color Shuffle — reshuffles every tile's colour
Mint Pop	15–19	Free Freeze — +3s on the timer
Berry Blast	20–29	Double Pop — next pop scores 2×
Cotton Candy	30–39	Mega Freeze — +6s on the timer
Rock Candy	40–59	Combo Chain — next three pops score 2×
Caramel Core	60–79	Magnet Clear — pops the largest group on the board
Starlight Taffy	80–99	Starburst — clears one full random row
Legendary Confection	100+	Wild Power — a random one of the above, every time

The music

This is the part that makes PopGrab itself. Your tune is a sequence of notes, and each pop plays the next one. Pop steadily and the tune comes out as music; pop erratically and it comes out as noise.

At the end of a round you get a Symphony rating for how much of your tune you actually played and how evenly you played it — Bronze, Silver at 45%, Gold at 70% — and a rating above Bronze adds a bonus to your Sparks. Consistency needs at least four pops before it means anything.

The tune editor

Free for everyone. Write your own note sequence, pick a scale and an instrument, and set tempo and reverb. Saved tunes go to your History, which is unlimited and local.

The AI Tuner

Describe a mood — "sad music-box waltz", "bright arcade march" — and a tune is generated for you. Keep it or discard it; either way it counts against a weekly allowance shown in the editor. The first few each week are free; after those, a remix asks you to watch a rewarded ad.

Cloud backup

Progress is saved on your device first and always, so rounds work with no signal. A copy is mirrored to the cloud so a reinstall can get it back — but only if you have signed in with Google or Apple. A guest account cannot be recovered.

Tune backups are separate and capped at 10 for the lifetime of an account. A tune that is not backed up still lives in your local History, which is unlimited.

Achievements

First Steps — finish your first round.
New Flavor — leave the starting tier.
Leveling Up — reach the target level.
Pop Machine — pop a lifetime total of tiles.
Gold Standard — earn a Gold rhythm rating.
Tune Smith — save a set number of tunes to History.

All of them are counted from things the game already tracks, so you will pass most without going looking.

A few habits that help

Clear from the bottom. Tiles fall, so popping low reshuffles more of the board than popping high.
Leave lone tiles alone. At 4 points they are the worst trade on the board unless the clock is nearly out.
Save the freeze power-ups for when you can see a large group forming, not for when time is already gone.
For a good Symphony rating, an even rhythm beats a fast one.