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Let’s imagine you have a friend who’s very good at Tetris. You’ve challenged them to a game with a twist: you get to pick which pieces they have to play. You agree that if your friend can survive 100,000 blocks then you’ll declare them the winner; but if they get game over before this, you win the challenge. So what do you do?
Tetris is a puzzle game of falling blocks that you can rotate and move as they fall. Forming complete horizontal lines clears all the squares in that line, and the aim is to prevent the blocks from stacking all the way to the top of the playfield, which results in game over.
The playfield is 10 cells wide and 20 cells tall and the game is played with seven different blocks, called one-sided tetrominoes, that are each made up of four squares. They are labelled I, J, L, O, S, T and Z because they look a bit like these letters.
There are many different versions of Tetris but, for the challenge against your friend, you will be playing a very simple version where you can pick any block you like, regardless of what has been picked previously, and the speed of the blocks falling stays the same through the whole game.
How to lose
First let’s look at the worst strategy you could go with: choosing the same block 100,000 times.
It’s easy to see that the I, J, L and O blocks fit very neatly together and can always be arranged to completely clear the playfield. The playfield will be cleared after only ten I blocks, ten J blocks, ten L blocks or five O blocks have been placed.
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