Bonds - Make Ten

Blocks fall. Any straight line that adds up to exactly ten clears away. That's the whole game. It's the ten-bond — the bit of arithmetic every child drills and every adult still has somewhere in muscle memory. 6 and 4. 7 and 3. 1, 2, 3 and 4 if you can set it up. IT NAMES THE BOND Clear a run and the board shows the sum that did it — 6 + 4 = 10. Not points flashing up: the actual arithmetic, so the pair gets named every time it's used. The four rules are explained with pictures before the first block falls, too. THREE GAMES, NOT ONE Easy never holds a digit back and runs a gentler clock — it's for learning the bonds, and it's the one to hand a child. Medium starts asking more of you. Hard withholds the digit you want and pushes a new row up from the floor every so often. Each keeps its own records, because a score on Easy isn't a score on Hard. CLEAR, THEN CLEAR AGAIN When a run clears,…