Orbium

Overview

Click a carousel and it snaps one quarter-turn; click a docked orb and it shoots back onto the rail, and those two gestures are the only input the game ever asks for. Orbium is Björn Nilsson's modern revival of Log!cal, a 1990s tile-routing puzzle, rebuilt in dependency-free JavaScript on an HTML5 canvas and released under the GPL in 2018. Colored orbs roll in from a lane and travel along fixed rails toward the rotators that anchor the board. Each rotator is a four-slot circular pad: you spin it to line an empty slot up with an arriving orb, the orb docks on contact, and you keep going until the pad holds four orbs of the same color, at which point it detonates and disappears. Wipe out every rotator and the level is done. What separates the later boards from a plain color-sort is the surrounding tile set — directors that redirect a moving orb onto a new heading, teleporters, color-changing transformers, plus matcher and sequencer pads that demand a specific color pattern or a fixed clearing order instead of four-of-a-kind. It is a quiet, routing-heavy design aimed at players who would rather think several orbs ahead than race a clock.

How to Play

The goal is to detonate every rotator on the board. An orb spawns at the lane and rolls along the rails; click any rotator to spin it 90° so an empty slot faces the incoming path, and the orb docks on contact when the slot is aligned. To eject an orb you no longer want, click it and it launches back down whichever rail its slot currently points at. Fill all four slots of a rotator with the same color and it explodes. On touch screens, tap a rotator to spin it and swipe across a docked orb to launch it. Tap the space above the board to pause and open the menu, and read the next-orb indicator so you are setting up for the color that is coming, not the one already in motion.

Tips & Strategy

Plan rotations one orb ahead by reading the next-orb indicator instead of reacting to whatever is already on the rail — by the time an orb is traveling, the slot you need should be open. Because a launched orb fires down whatever rail its slot currently faces, spinning a rotator before you launch redirects the orb to a completely different part of the board, which is usually faster than waiting for a fresh orb from the lane. On matcher levels, abandon four-of-a-kind and copy the exact color pattern the matcher displays, or a pad full of matching orbs will sit there uselessly. On sequencer levels you must clear rotators in the indicated color order, so decide in advance which pad you will sacrifice to each color before you start docking. Avoid dropping a mismatched fifth color into a pad you are trying to complete, since digging it back out costs launches that some levels cap with a counter.