Ring Match — free browser game

This is an original puzzle that adds a 'toroidal' mathematical twist to the classic match-3 genre. In standard match-3 games you swap two neighbouring tiles to make a match of 3 or more; in Ring Match there is no swapping — instead, every row and column behaves as a closed ring. When you click a horizontal or vertical arrow at the edge of the board, that row or column shifts one step, and the tile that falls off one end wraps back in at the other end, just like the surface of a doughnut (a torus). If 3 or more tiles of the same colour line up horizontally or vertically during or after this shift, they pop, earning you points and progress toward the goal. The empty spaces are filled by later row/column shifts or by a fresh stream of tiles from the top. Each level has its own objective: pop a certain colour N times, clear locked/frozen tiles, achieve a specific combination, and so on; you also have a limited number of moves per level, and if you run out of moves the level fails and you try again from the start. All 100 levels come with procedurally scaled increasing difficulty, your progress is written to the browser's localStorage, and you pick up right where you left off even if you close the page. Keyboard control is faster for advanced players: the arrow keys choose the shift direction and the number keys 1-9 choose which row or column to shift. Strategy: a single shift can often set off more than one chain of matches — thinking a few moves ahead and planning consecutive pops (a combo) both speeds up the goal and adds points to your move economy. Corner tiles belong to two rings at once, so it pays to think about the corners strategically.