Seedpods

Tap a pod to give it a seed. At four it bursts, and its seeds fly into the next pods each way. Clear the field.

What is Seedpods?

Seedpods is a chain reaction puzzle in a garden bed. Tap a seed pod to give it a seed: a pod that gets its fourth bursts, and its seeds fly up, down, left and right into the next pods, which can burst in turn. Clear the whole field in the taps given. Easy fields are 6 by 6, and a tap or two clears them; expert ones are 8 by 8, take four, and only one to three sets of taps do it.

Hard Seedpods fields

Hard fields are 7 by 7, with about twenty-five pods and three taps to clear them. Only a handful of sets of taps work, and the tap that bursts the most pods at once is nearly always the wrong one to start with.

Practice gives you fields you haven't cleared yet, as many as you like, and keeps your best time without hints. Every field is made and checked by a computer, and the taps it gives you are the fewest that clear it.

How to play Seedpods

The field is a garden bed with seed pods on some of its cells. Each pod holds one, two or three seeds, which show as peas inside it.
Tap a pod to give it a seed. A pod that gets its fourth bursts: it's gone, and its four seeds fly out, one up, one down, one left and one right.
A flying seed keeps going until it lands in the first pod in its way, which gains a seed, and bursts in turn if that was its fourth: a chain. A seed that flies off the field is lost.
Clear the whole field in the taps given, the fewest that can, worked out by a computer.

Taps go only on pods. Out of taps with pods left? Undo, or start over: undo has no limit, and Ctrl+Z takes back a tap with its whole chain. With a keyboard, the arrow keys move between cells, and Enter or Space taps. You're ranked by time. In the settings, Seed numbers shows each pod's seeds as a number too, and Fast chains plays chains out twice as fast.

Solving tips

Follow the rows and columns. Seeds only ever fly straight along them, so a pod with no other pod in its row or its column can only be burst by tapping it.
The biggest chain isn't always the answer. It can leave a pod that no seed can reach any more. Look for the pods that are hardest to reach first, and plan the chain that gets to them.
Mind the timing. Once a pod has burst, seeds fly straight over its cell to the pods behind it. Two seeds that reach a pod in the same moment both count, but a pod never needs more than four.
Top up, then set off. Sometimes the best first taps only add seeds, so that one big chain at the end clears everything.
Stuck? A hint shows the next tap of a way to clear the field, or how many taps to take back.