Jewel Match

Jewel Match was one of those games you'd find tucked away on a Flash gaming site in the early 2000s. It didn't try to be anything more than a straightforward puzzle game, and that was its appeal. You would load it up in your browser, and for a little while, the rest of the web just faded away.

You control a simple hammer cursor. Your job is to clear each board of all its jewels, which are locked inside small golden boxes. You click on groups of two or more matching jewels to smash them. The trick is that you can only break jewels that are not trapped inside their boxes; you often have to clear the jewels around a box first to crack it open. The pace is steady, but the boards get more crowded, introducing obstacles that require a bit of planning. It feels like a quiet, methodical process of tidying up a very cluttered and colorful space.