Orchard Merge
About Orchard Merge
Orchard Merge is a physics puzzle about dropping fruit into a jar. Two of the same fruit that touch become the next fruit up, and the chain runs through eleven sizes from the smallest berry to the largest melon. Everything rolls, settles and shifts under real physics, so a drop you thought was safe can nudge the pile and set off a run of merges you never planned. Let the pile rise past the line across the top of the jar and the round is finished.
How to play
Move along the top of the jar to line the next fruit up, then let it go. The fruit coming after that is previewed at the bottom.
Rules of Orchard Merge
- Eleven fruit sizes are in play, and two of a kind that touch merge into one of the next size up.
- A merge is scored on the size that merged, paying one, three, six, ten, fifteen, twenty one, twenty eight, thirty six, forty five, fifty five and sixty six points as the sizes climb.
- Two of the largest melon merge as well, and the pair comes back as the smallest berry, so the ladder loops instead of stopping at the top.
- You only ever drop from the top of the jar, and only the smaller fruits come out of the queue.
- There is a short pause after each drop before the next fruit is ready to release.
- Everything inside the jar is under real physics, so fruit rolls, stacks unevenly and resettles after every merge.
- A fruit left resting above the line across the top of the jar ends the round.
- The next fruit is previewed in the bar at the bottom, which is what lets you set up a pair.
- Your highest score is kept on this device and shown beside the jar.
Controls
- Move across the top of the jar to aim
- Release to drop the fruit
- Try Again on the end card starts a fresh round
What makes it worth playing
- Real physics rather than a grid, so no two piles ever settle the same way.
- A preview of the fruit after next, which turns this from luck into planning.
- Merge sounds that step up in pitch as the fruit get larger.
- Eleven fruit, each with its own artwork and its own pop, so the ladder reads at a glance.
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-09-14.
Tips from playing it
- Sort by size across the jar, large on one side and small on the other. A sorted pile merges itself as it settles.
- Send small fruit to the small side even when a merge looks tempting elsewhere. Strays in the middle are what end a run.
- Wait for the pile to stop moving before the next release. A fruit landing on a shifting stack rolls somewhere you did not pick.
- When the pile gets high, aim for the lowest dip rather than a matching fruit. Buying height is worth more than the points.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
The fruit merger we started from had somebody else's title baked into its menu artwork and a peach background that clashed with everything around it. We drew new menu art and a new start button, moved the whole thing onto a deep orchard green, and renamed it. The physics, the fruit ladder and the scoring are untouched, because that balance is the game. We also cut an external font request, so the page now loads from our servers alone. We played a full round to ninety five points on a phone before this page went live.
More on how we pick and fix these: how we make our own editions of classic games and how we test a game.
We wrote about this one
- How we make our own editions of classic games. A tableau of cards, a sliding tile square, four discs in a row. Nobody owns those rules. Here is what goes into turning one of them into a game that holds up on a phone.
- How a game gets tested before it goes on this site. Every game here is played through on a real phone-sized screen before it is published. Here is the checklist, and the bugs it has actually caught.
- Category
- Puzzle
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Players
- One player.
- Difficulty
- Relaxing for five minutes, then quietly tense.
- Typical session
- Five to fifteen minutes a round.
- Last tested by us
- 2026-09-14
