Sand Slides

Sand Slides is a game based around a cellular automata algorithm that simulates falling grains of sand. Sand enters the play area from one of three hoppers at the top of the screen which slowly fill and then dump the sand into the interactive part of the screen. It's then the player's job to draw lines which creates 'slides' or 'buckets' to hold the sand temporarily until it is time to slide the correct colored sand into the matching collector at the bottom of the screen. The player can only have three lines on screen at the same time, with the oldest line being removed when a new line is drawn.

Whilst it sounds simple on the face of it, things get tricky as more sand enters the play area and you must get creative and also be quick witted in order to keep things moving. Dump sand into the wrong colored collector and you will lose grains from your grain counter at the top, when that reaches zero its game over. Higher scores can be achieved by collecting 2 or more colors of sand at the same time to build up the combo bonus.

This is the main game mode in a nutshell and there are several variations of the same, each with lower grain counters which leave less room for error. There is also a Challenge mode which see's the player trying to score as many points as possible in a set number of sand drops. Games can be played 5 minutes here or there as the game always saves and resumes where you left off.