Polytris

Polytris is a Tetris-style falling-block puzzle for the classic Macintosh, distinguished by its use of polyominoes of one to five connected squares rather than the traditional seven tetrominoes. Authored by STH at Penn State (STH@ecl.psu.edu) and distributed via Info-Mac, the version found in the archive is 1.09.

How it plays

As in Tetris, the player stays in the game by clearing rows: any horizontal line that fills completely without holes is removed. The expanded block set, drawn from polyominoes of one to five squares, raises the difficulty of fitting pieces cleanly.

Block set

Polytris ships with 29 distinct block shapes, well beyond Tetris's seven, plus special pieces including bombs, weights, and water balloons that change how the playfield evolves from move to move.

Difficulty

Difficulty is configurable through the preferences dialog, letting players tune the challenge by adjusting how the expanded block roster and special pieces enter play.

Distribution

The game was archived on Info-Mac as polytris-109.hqx in BinHex form, typical of mid-1990s Mac shareware puzzle releases.