Lantern Season
Match lanterns and they rise. The sky keeps everything you have let go of.
What it is
A seven by seven board of coloured lanterns. Swap two that are next to each other to line up three or more, they light, and they lift off the board. Everything above them falls in.
You already know how to play this. That is deliberate: nothing has been added to make it clever.
The sky is the point
Cleared lanterns do not vanish. They rise off the board into the sky and stay there for the rest of the night, swaying gently. The high ones are far away, small and dim; the low ones are close and bright.
By the end of a good night the sky is full, and all of it is yours.
A night is twenty moves
Each night has a target. Reach it and the night rises, the sky clears and you get twenty fresh moves for the next night. Fall short and the run is over.
A move is only spent on a swap that actually makes a line: try something that does not work and the lanterns slide back and it costs you nothing. Match four or more and you leave a beacon, and a beacon caught in any later match lights its whole row and column at once.
What it does not do
No timer counting down at you, no currency, no unlocks, no daily anything, and nothing to come back for tomorrow. It also has no tutorial, because a game like this should not need one.
The board will never leave you stuck either: if no legal move remains it quietly redeals what is already there.
How to play
- Swap two lanternsDrag one into the other
- OrTap one, then the other
On a desktop, the mouse drags exactly like a finger. On a keyboard, the arrow keys move, Enter or Space picks up a lantern, and an arrow swaps it.
What isn't settled yet
The difficulty was measured rather than guessed. What is still open is the long run: from about night 13 each target rises by only a few lanterns, and from night 21 some nights ask for exactly what the one before did, so a deep run changes little from one night to the next.
Build Log
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Build 4
Night targets used to climb by the same step forever, so a deep run ended on arithmetic rather than on play. The step now shrinks every night (+15, +12, +9, +8) and settles at 250 by night 29. A target that grows at a constant rate is a wall with a delay.
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Build 2
Half the screen sat empty in a game about filling the sky. The board now hangs from the bottom edge and the space above it is the sky: lit lanterns rise into it and stay there until the night ends. It also put the board under the thumb rather than mid-screen.
Credits and licences
No third-party engine and no embedded typefaces: it uses whichever fonts your device already has. Cover drawn from the game’s own lantern, board and sky code.
Lantern Season is original work by Launchway Games.