Balbal is a mahjong solitaire game. In the classic form you touch two matching tiles at once; here something sits in between: the tray.
You take a free tile from the pile and it flies into the tray. When you find its twin the pair bursts and a slot opens up. Tiles whose twins you have not found pile up in the tray. When the tray fills, the level ends.
Everything hangs on that one rule: which tile you take, and when. In classic mahjong a bad move costs you time; here it costs you space.
What makes a tile free
A tile is free when both of these hold:
- no living tile on a higher layer covers its footprint, and
- its right or left edge is clear on its own layer.
The pile is three-dimensional; taking a tile frees what sits above it, not below. This is why the skeletons — the silhouettes of the boards — matter: a board's difficulty is not how many tiles it has but how many are free at once.
Thirty-four types, one hundred and forty-four tiles
The tiles fall into seven suits, all drawn from Turkic myth:
| Suit | Types | How it matches |
|---|---|---|
| Sky | 9 | Same number |
| Birch | 9 | Same number |
| Tamga | 9 | Same number |
| Elements (Fire, Wind, Water, Earth) | 4 | Same number |
| Spirits (Umay, Tengri, Erlik) | 3 | Same number |
| Animal | 4 | Within the suit, any two |
| Season | 4 | Within the suit, any two |
Animal and Season tiles are the bonus suits: any two of the four match each other, the way flowers and seasons work in classic mahjong.
The same code is a different object in every realm. In the Middle World Tamga 4 is the Grey Wolf; in the Underworld it is a Horned Skull; in the Sky it is an Eagle. Every symbol is here.
Every board is solvable
That is a method, not a boast. A level is not dealt at random and hoped for: a valid removal order is generated first, and the tiles are laid out by matching consecutive pairs from that order.
The guarantee: an order that clears the board using at most two tray slots always exists. You have four, so you have room to be wrong.
All 1500 levels are played end to end by a simulated player on every release. If there is a board it cannot solve, the release does not ship.
No timers, no forced moves
No countdown. No lives. No energy, no timer to wait out. Staring at a board for five minutes does not break the game — that is what the game is asking for.
When you lock up there are three helpers: Shuffle redeals the board, Hint shows a matching pair, Undo returns the last tile to the board.
The chain
The chain is what really drives the score. Quick matches in a row grow a multiplier; it caps at three and resets if you go four seconds without a match. Finishing a board with no helpers at all pays a bonus of its own.
Scores land in six bands: Incredible, Splendid, Immense, Flawless, Epic, Legend. The bands move floor by floor — "Legend" on the Steppe and "Legend" on Tengri's Floor are not the same number.
Thirty floors
The journey splits into three realms: the Middle World (14 floors), the Underworld (7), the Sky (9). Every floor has its own four colours, its own ground, its own sound and its own skeleton.
Walk the realms · All the floors
Offline
The game works in full without an internet connection. The first three levels play without an account; after that it asks you to sign in with Google or Apple so your progress survives a new device. It keeps working offline after that.