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Spindown
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About the game
Spindown is a puzzle game where you never move a piece yourself. Each level is a small chamber seen from the side, built from walls, open floor, coloured marbles and coloured blocks. All you can do is turn the whole chamber a quarter turn to the left or to the right. When it stops, gravity takes over: marbles roll, blocks slide, and everything drops until it lands on something solid.
Pieces of the same colour vanish the moment they touch, side by side or one on top of the other. A red marble that ends up next to the red block disappears with it, and two marbles of the same colour clear each other too. A level is solved when no coloured piece is left in the chamber.
The grey bars are what makes it tricky. They fall with gravity like everything else and are never removed, so they block corridors, push marbles off course and sometimes hold a piece in place exactly where you need it. Turning the board the wrong way can strand a marble in a corner it can no longer leave, which is why every move can be undone.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Advance: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. Chris Pickel made it for the GBA Jam 2026, and it runs here in the mGBA emulator. Click Play, press Enter on the title screen and pick a level from the list. The name of each level is shown under the grid as you move through it.
There are fifty levels, from short lessons that introduce each rule to large mazes and puzzles shaped like fruit, everyday objects and alchemical symbols. The counter in the bottom corner shows how many turns you have used. The game remembers which levels you have solved in the cartridge save, which stays in this browser, and F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment while F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | GBA button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / Right | D-pad | turn the board a quarter turn |
| A / S | L / R | turn the board left / right |
| Z | B | undo the last turn |
| X | A | redo a turn you undid |
| Shift | Select | restart the level |
| Enter | Start | pause menu (continue, restart, back to the level list) |
| Arrows, X or Enter | D-pad, A or Start | choose a level |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Think two turns ahead. One turn rarely solves anything. Look at where each piece will land after the turn, and then where it will go after the next one.
Watch the grey bars. They move with gravity too. Often the real puzzle is getting a bar out of the way first, or parking it where it will stop a marble at the right spot.
Undo is free. Z takes back turns one at a time and X replays them, so you can try a sequence, rewind and compare. Shift starts the level over.
Credits and licence
Spindown was created by Chris Pickel (sfiera), who wrote the code, designed the levels and drew the graphics; the idea of turning the board comes from the PlayStation puzzle game U-SA (Turnabout) by Artdink, but every level and image is new. It is free software under the MIT licence. The ROM also contains the start-up file of the devkitARM toolchain, released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, whose source code is hosted alongside the game. The licence texts are linked from this page.