Scrolling

Usually match-three puzzles wait for the player to tap the screen, but what would happen if the player were to drag his finger over the tiles? In a standard game mode, that affects nothing; the game catches the first touch, ignoring the last part of the gesture. That is not very interesting, but let's imagine a game where the drag gesture can have real purpose. What can it do? Ordinarily, it is used to scroll some long content over the screen; users push UI elements to give them some motion. Here the idea would work like this: each row of the array with tiles is much wider than the screen—for instance, it may include 30 elements—but a player sees only 8 tiles (the width of screen) and he has to scroll a row left or right to see elements hidden beyond the screen frame. By moving each row, the player can align tiles, forming new sequences. The row moves with some inertia and acceleration; the game has some snapping mechanics to align tiles correctly. Let's call this mode Scroll ...