Pixel Blow Up

Tap a nest. A crew of tiny ants pours out, hauls away every crumb of its own color, and carries it home.

Then you pick the next color. That is the whole game — and it gets hard fast.

A calm, one-handed color puzzle about an ant colony clearing a picnic off a sunny lawn. No timer, no lives, no ads.

HOW IT PLAYS

Every card in your tray is one nest: a color, and a number that says how much food those ants will bring home. Tap a card and the nest drops into one of your five slots. From there the ants do the walking — out onto the plate, onto the food that matches their color, and back to the mound.

The catch is that ants can only walk in from outside the plate. A color that is walled in on every side is out of reach, so you peel the rim first and the middle opens up as you go. Choosing which color to open, and when, is the entire puzzle.

Five slots is the only bottleneck in the game. A nest keeps its slot until its last ant is home, so filling all five with colors that have nothing left to reach leaves the colony stuck. When that happens you can spend a wake to send one starving nest home and get its slot straight back.

WHAT YOU GET

- 100 levels, each one machine-checked to be solvable before it ships

- 28 foods to collect on your pantry shelf: a mushroom, an acorn, a fig, a wedge of cheese, a slice of watermelon, a peanut still in its shell

- 4 colony upgrades — quicker workers, busier nests and an autumn coat for the mound — opened by hauling food home, never bought

- Speed control from 1x to 4x, free and always available

- Color-blind marks, plus sound, music and vibration switches

- English, Chinese and Portuguese

NO STRINGS

- No ads. Not one.

- No in-app purchases. Nothing in this game has a price — the numbers on the upgrade screen are thresholds, not costs.

- No account and no sign-in. Your progress lives on your phone.

- No energy bar, no lives, no daily streak waiting to punish you for missing a day.

- Plays offline. Every level ships inside the app.

- One optional reminder a day, at most, and only if you ask for it.

WHO IT IS FOR

If you like watching a good plan run itself more than you like fast fingers, this game is built for you. One tap, portrait, one hand, no precision and no reflexes. A level takes about a minute, so it fits a bus stop as well as an evening.

The sun is going down and the picnic is still out on the grass. Get it home.