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Open-ended homework for those who are interested: solve the same problem, but with actual Tetris rules.

I've seen a bunch of those "adversarial tetris" variants, and they all operate under the assumption that any of the seven pieces can appear at any time, and with only one preview.

Modern Tetris has 3 previews + hold, and pieces are drawn randomly "from a bag", without replacement (more formally, if P[i] is the sequence of pieces, each aligned subsequence of 7 pieces must be a permutation of the tetrominos).

This would be more interesting to make/play. Note that under such rules there exists a strategy that allows infinite play if the well is at least 17 tiles high.

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To be fair, the random piece selection is how the Tetris on the NES and GB worked, which is how many Americans were introduced to Tetris. Getting 5 Z or S pieces in a row was definitely something that happens regularly in those versions.

An interesting note about the versions that use the piece bag strategy is that the game can be solved. It's possible to play until the game speeds up to the point where you can no longer get a piece to the edge of the screen before it hits the bottom. https://tetris.wiki/Playing_forever

Fun fact, Tetris is NP-Hard. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-pr...

The most popular Tetris was the original, it is one of the most sold video games ever, and it didn't even allow you to hold a piece. That is what people think of when they hear Tetris, it isn't old enough that the people who played it back then are dead.

It's actually doubtful most people have even seen the original, let alone played it ;)

Still, Nintendo's Tetris implementations on NES and Game Boy are both early and among the best-known versions, neither of which use a piece bag.

NES Tetris is both a pretty good implementation to be enjoyable, and it's unchanging in a way that makes it ideal for competition. It is gaining new players to this day.

For anyone wondering, the original implementation was on a PDP-11 clone called Electronika 60 https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_(Electronika_60) ... not the 1989 Game Boy version most people consider to be the "original" :)

I've got the backplane and boards to build a more-or-less LSI-11, the original system cloned by the Electronika 60. One day I really want to load the original Tetris onto it somehow... Would probably have to use a terminal emulator to get the Cyrillic character set to render, but I bet it's possible!

> NES Tetris is both a pretty good implementation to be enjoyable, and it's unchanging in a way that makes it ideal for competition. It is gaining new players to this day.

Not only new players, but also new techniques (for fast side movement):

After 1. DAS (holding the d-pad) and 2. Hypertapping (rapidly tapping the d-pad with one finger) now there is 3. Rolling (rapidly tapping the controller with multiple fingers in succession). The geekiness is strong with these.

https://kottke.org/21/05/new-nes-tetris-technique

I would at minimum like to play this with a Hold option. I'm not a huge fan of the mechanic in normal Tetris, because IMO dealing with and recovering from unfortunately-timed pieces is a key part of the game. But, that's not really an issue here!

Hold changes the game enough that if you don't like it I can't blame you, but it's not about recovering. It's about storing T pieces to allow B2B TSD to be performed safely, without the threat of 5-10 lines of garbage coming your way. In general, I fall on the side of those who like it because it opens the game to more variation in strategies. Removing hold would also be a buff to strategies that aren't particularly fun to play against like 4-wide.

But that's for PvP games. IMO, the problem with modern Tetris rules is that they're optimized for PvP modes at the expense of marathon mode.

In marathon mode, the only garbage blocks are the mess you create for yourself. These arise naturally from situations such as (1) receiving the wrong piece at the wrong time and (2) failing to maneuver a piece correctly before it locks. It is good for these situations to arise naturally during the course of the game.

If I was in charge of Tetris, I would retain Hold, EasySpin, and piece previews in PvP games where they make sense, but I'd disable them in marathon mode.

Did you just nerd snipe all of HN?

Kind of a self-snipe, really :)

I spent more time that's reasonable on Tetris, but mostly on modern variants. The 'classic' tetris most people are used to feels kind of weird to me.

There's an aversarial Tetris you can play in any Tetris implementation: no rotation. It's surprisingly hard.

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