Patch Bay - A Free Block Stacking Game Inside a Eurorack Rack
Skiff 01 - Rack Mounting Station
How To Play
You are the sound engineer of an experimental analogue lab. A runaway master clock keeps shipping Eurorack modules into your skiff, the 10 by 20 case in the middle of the screen. Slide them, rotate them and mount them so they complete a full row: that closes a signal path, a voltage pulse runs through the jacks, the patch cables let go and the row disappears. Let the modules reach the top rail and the rack short-circuits. Then the magic smoke gets out.
- The modules: MULT (the long one), VCA (the square), EG, VCO, VCF, LFO and FOLD. The same seven shapes as the 1984 original, each with its own panel, knob, jack and status LED
- Patch cables: every module you mount next to another one gets patched to it. Fill the case and it turns into cable spaghetti
- Keyboard: ◀ ▶ or A D move, ▲ or X rotate, Z rotates the other way, ▼ soft drop, SPACE hard drop, C or SHIFT buffer, P pause
- Touch: the buttons under the case, or swipe on the case itself: sideways to move, tap to rotate, flick down to drop
- The Buffer: park one module and swap it back in later. Once per shipment
- Pending Shipments: the next three modules on the way, so you can plan the rack
- Total Voltage: your score, in millivolts. 10 mV for every module you mount, then 100, 200, 400 or 800 mV for closing 1, 2, 3 or 4 rows at once. Four rows is a Master Patch
- Clock: every closed row makes the master clock run faster, from 100 BPM upwards with no limit. The level goes up every ten rows
Press FULLSCREEN (or the F key) to play on the whole screen; on a phone, hold it upright. Make the top 10 and you get to sign the hall of fame below. You get 25 characters, so make them count.
Rack Customizer
Every millivolt you score, in every game, adds to your total voltage. Total voltage and achievements unlock case skins, cable styles and soundbanks. Your rack is saved in this browser.
Hall Of Fame
- 1STLOADING SCORES.........ROWS ...
Why This Game Is Here
In 1984 Alexey Pajitnov wrote a small game on an Electronika 60 at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow: seven shapes made of four squares, falling into a well. There was no colour and no sound, the shapes were drawn with brackets, and it was still impossible to stop playing. Forty years later it is probably the most copied game idea in existence, and for good reason. The rules fit on a napkin and the game never ends the same way twice.
My version lives where this website lives: in the studio. The well is a Eurorack skiff with wooden cheeks, the shapes are modules with a panel, a knob, a jack and a status LED, and every module you mount gets patched to its neighbours. Anyone who has built a modular system knows the feeling. You buy a module that does not fit, you move three others to make room, and somewhere along the way the whole rack fills up and the cables take over. Here at least the rack empties itself when you close a signal path.
The gameplay is deliberately classic: ten columns, twenty rows, the original seven shapes and the original scoring, measured in millivolts. I added a ghost outline, a hard drop, a buffer and a queue of pending shipments, plus touch controls. The sound is effects only, so your own records can keep playing: a click, a sweep or a wobble from the module you just mounted, a drone that thickens as the case fills up, a voltage pulse when a row closes, a bass drop on a Master Patch and a distorted feedback squeal with a cloud of magic smoke when the rack gives up. Score enough voltage and the Rack Customizer lets you swap the case for black anodised, brass or neon, change the cables, and route the row clears through the 808 samples of this site's drum machine, an acid 303 or West Coast FM blips.
The code is based on the open-source JavaScript Tetris by Jake Gordon (MIT licence). The click, drop, impact and power-up samples come from Kenney's CC0 sound packs; the drum sounds are the TR-808 samples from this site.
More Free Games And Tools
Rack full? Try the other games: Stellar Invaders, Stellar Singularity and 808 Defender. Or patch a real one: make your own beats on the online TR-808 drum machine, grab the free Lloyd's Lasers VST3 plugin, and hear what my own Eurorack ends up in on the music page.