jade-garden

▶ Play right now in your browser — no download, no install, no signup. Just click Run game below.

A downloadable macOS build is also available at the bottom of the page if you'd rather own the files.

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A garden asleep for a thousand years

Xiao Lin has walked for three days. At dusk, a wall of moss-covered stone appears. Behind it: an abandoned garden. At its centre, a stele carved with a poem whose characters are almost worn away.

jade-garden is a match-3 puzzle about patience, memory, and the slow return of colour. Every match you clear restores a fragment of the garden. Every level reveals a character of 《春晓》 ("Spring Dawn"), a Tang-dynasty poem by Meng Haoran.

No timer pressure. No rush. You have a fixed number of moves, and as much time as you want to think about them.

How to play

• Click a jade, then click an adjacent jade to swap them.
• Align 3 or more identical jades to clear them.
• Jades that fall into new alignments trigger cascades — each cascade multiplies your score.
• Complete the level objective before you run out of moves.

Each of the six jades has a distinct silhouette, so you can tell them apart even without colour: round, hexagon, diamond, octagon, pentagon, square. Colourblind-friendly by design.

Three kinds of objectives

• Score N — reach a target score.
• Clear N Jade — remove N jades of a given type (e.g. "Clear 15 Bi").
• Trigger N cascades — chain reactions. Only cascades count; the first match after a swap is free.

Twelve levels, four chapters, one poem

The garden doesn't change, but the light does. Each chapter has its own palette — cool damp dawn, cold mineral silence, warm spring gold, jade-green awakening — drawn as a shan-shui scroll that drifts slowly behind the board.

Reveal the poem one character at a time. At the end, an epilogue. If you finish between September and November, something else waits for you.

🏁 Speedrunning & leaderboards

Every level is deterministic. The board is generated from a fixed seed, so two players starting "The Broken Stele" see the exact same jades, in the same order, forever. This means:

• Best times are comparable. The game tracks your fastest time to reach each star tier (1★, 2★, 3★) on every level, plus the moment of your peak score. Those records show up in the level select menu, next to your best score.
• The HUD has a live timer. Top-right corner. It never pressures you (there's no time limit), but it's there if you want to chase a personal best.
• Two ways to compete:
  • Score runs — maximise cascades before running out of moves. The score ceiling is also deterministic per level.
  • Time runs — finish the objective as fast as possible. Fastest path to each star, then the whole campaign.

I don't run any official leaderboard yet, but if you post a time or a score in the comments, I'll keep a list. Bonus points for beating my own best on any level — my record on The Garden Awakens is 1:47 on 3★.

Features

• Twelve hand-tuned levels with explicit star thresholds
• Three stars per level, plus best-time tracking and peak-score timestamp
• Shape-matched hover and hints — the ring wraps the jade's silhouette
• In-game help modal (Tab / F1) for controls and the six jades
• Procedural jade rendering — no sprite assets
• Original ambient soundtrack (Sonican)
• Zero telemetry, zero accounts, zero internet required

Controls

Click	select / swap a jade
H	show a hint (3 per level)
Tab / F1	open or close the help
Enter	continue / confirm
R	replay (from won or lost screens)
Esc	back to menu

Notes

In the browser: click Run game above, the game takes over your screen, and you play. Nothing to install, nothing to configure. Your progress lives in the browser tab — closing it resets your best scores, so screenshot your victories if you care about them.

macOS desktop version (download below):

This build is unsigned. On first launch, right-click the jade-garden file → Open → Open again in the dialog. macOS remembers your choice after that.

Or in Terminal: xattr -cr /path/to/jade-garden

Credits

• Design, code, art: Ember Workspace
• Music: Sonican
• Fonts: Noto Sans SC (SIL OFL 1.1), DejaVu Sans Mono
• Poem: 《春晓》 by Meng Haoran (唐, 689–740) — public domain