Taisen Puzzle Dama

Taisen Puzzle Dama is a 1994 arcade puzzle game from Konami. The word taisen means versus or head-to-head in Japanese, and that is the whole character of the thing: not meditative solo tile-arranging, but a logic duel between two players in which every success on one side means trouble on the other.

The mid-nineties were the golden age of the competitive puzzler. Japanese arcades had discovered that a logic game could be a spectator sport: coloured pieces fall into two adjacent fields, players assemble matching groups, and well-executed clears dump junk into the opponent's half. Whoever gets buried loses. Chain reactions set up several moves in advance are the genre's fireworks, drawing crowds around a cabinet as reliably as any fighting game.

Konami's contribution to that ferment was precisely the Puzzle Dama line, and the arcade origin shows in the design — a match is short, the rules take a minute to grasp, and the tension thickens with the falling speed. This is also why the type has aged so well: competitive logic works exactly as well now as it did in 1994.

Which brings the good news. A match is one click away — the game runs directly in the browser on OldGame.cz, so the coloured pieces can start falling without installing a thing.