Bejeweled

Overview

Bejeweled (originally known as Diamond Mine) is a tile-matching puzzle game developed and released by PopCap Games for online browsers in November 2000. It later received a downloadable version for Windows PCs in May 2001 under the name Bejeweled Deluxe.

Based on the obscure indie 1994 MS-DOS game Шарики (Shariki, or "Balloons"), Bejeweled tasks players with forming matches of three-or-more jewels of the same shape and color in a full 8×8 board (which constantly refreshes itself from the top, allowing for cascading matches). Players can only swap two adjacent gems (horizontally or vertically) if a match is made by the swap, with the game's losing condition being that no valid swaps can be made (although the Timed mode refreshes the board, with the losing condition being an empty timer).

The game later received multiple sequels.