What your clears send, and what lands in your Well.
In duels and rumbles your line clears become Sludge, solid rows that rise from the bottom of your opponent's Well, each with a single gap. Sludge does not clear itself: your opponent has to dig it out, and while they dig they are not attacking you.
| Clear | Rows sent | As a Twist |
|---|---|---|
| Single | 0 | 2 |
| Double | 1 | 4 |
| Triple | 2 | 6 |
| Quad | 4 | 6 |
On top of the base value: a back-to-back streak adds 1 row, a chain adds up to 5 rows, and a Sparkle adds 10. Those stack, which is how a single well-built clear can bury someone.
Incoming Sludge does not land immediately. It waits 1s in a pending queue, shown beside your Well. If you clear lines during that window, your outgoing attack cancels the incoming rows one for one before any of it enters your board; only the remainder crosses over.
This is the central skill of versus play. A player who answers a Quad with a Quad takes nothing at all. Panicking and clearing a single instead cancels nothing at all: a single sends zero rows, so the whole volley still lands.
When the timer expires, pending rows rise into your Well from below, pushing your stack up. At most 8 rows enter at once, so a huge attack arrives across several waves rather than instantly ending you. Every row in one volley shares the same gap column, so a single well-placed vertical blob can clear several rows of it at once: which is what makes digging survivable.
No versus game runs forever. In a duel, sudden death begins at 3:00: both Wells take one rising row every 10s, and the gravity floor climbs one level every 5s until it reaches level 15. In a rumble the finale starts at 5:00 with a rising row every 5s for everyone still alive.
The ramp is deliberately gradual rather than an instant jump to maximum speed: the endgame should get progressively harder, not switch to a different game.
In rumbles, knocking a player out grants you their badges plus one. Each badge you hold adds 25% to the Sludge you send (items are not boosted) so a player who has taken two opponents out hits meaningfully harder than one who has not. The bonus rounds down, so one badge adds nothing to a send of only a row or two. Badges transfer again when you are eliminated, so the biggest threat in a rumble keeps moving.