kGems - a match-3 puzzle — Community App Review
Version: 1.0.1
Another small offline game for the Kompakt: kGems, a classic match-3 on an 8×8 board.
Swap two adjacent gems to line up three or more, they clear, the rest fall, new ones drop in from the top, and cascades score progressively more. No timer, no levels, no losing — if a board runs out of legal moves it reshuffles itself.
The interesting part was the e-ink design. Colour is obviously out, and grey shades are unreliable, so all seven gem types are distinguished along three independent axes at once: silhouette, interior pattern and fill density. Three of them deliberately share the circle outline and differ only inside. That idea is borrowed from the greyscale build of an old Palm OS match-3 I used to play on a Zire — they solved the same problem on a 160×160 mono screen twenty years ago, and it still holds up.
Everything is pure 1-bit black and white, and the whole board is redrawn on every step. Tap to select, tap an adjacent gem to swap. The selected gem is shown inverted.
Zero Android permissions, no network, no background services. Progress survives the app being killed. English and Czech UI. GPL-3.0.
APK on the releases page, sideload via Mudita Center or ADB. Feedback welcome — particularly on whether the gem shapes stay readable for you, since that is the one thing that is hard to judge from my own screen.
Check also my other Kompakt apps: https://kapps.ok1cdj.com/
Regards, Ondrej