Strategy guides › Block Fit

How to score high in Block Fit: what actually ends your runs

Eigengames team · 6 October 2026 · 5 min read

▶ Play Block Fit🎯 Start with the three biggest pieces

Half the board is empty. Forty-one free squares, and the piece in your hand is six squares big. It still does not fit anywhere, because those forty-one squares are scattered in ones and twos across the whole board like crumbs.

That is how Block Fit games end. Almost never because the board is full; almost always because the space you have left is the wrong shape. Here is what we learned by letting the game’s own code play itself a few thousand times.

The rules that matter

You get three pieces at a time, chosen at random from a fixed set of shapes: single squares, dominoes, bars of three and four, small corners, L and T shapes, a 2×2 square, a big 3×3 corner, and two six-square slabs, one 2 wide by 3 tall and one 3 wide by 2 tall. Pieces never rotate. Place all three and you get three more. Fill a whole row or column and it clears. The game ends the moment none of the pieces in your hand fits anywhere.

Scoring is one point per square placed plus 10 per line cleared, and when one placement clears two or more lines at once, every line earns 5 extra. A double is worth 30 instead of 20; a triple 45 instead of 30.

Two slabs end most games

We wrote several automatic players that use the game’s real piece set and placement code on the 9×9 board, and played 300 games with each. The most careful of them (more on what it does below) died with an average of 37% of the board still empty. Then we looked at which piece it was holding when it died.

In 65% of those games the piece that could not fit was one of the two six-square slabs. In another 11% it was the big 3×3 corner. Each slab is just one of 19 entries in the piece list, and a hand of three contains at least one slab only 28% of the time, yet together they end nearly two games in three. Everything else in the set, including the long bars, is a minor cause of death.

So the whole game is one question, asked every time you place a piece: after this, is there still a 2×3 and a 3×2 hole somewhere? You do not need a full 3×3 hole at all times; the slabs only need six squares in the right shape.

Clear lines first, place neatly second

The single biggest jump in our tests came from going for lines. Here are the medians on 9×9:

Packing pieces tidily into one corner nearly triples a random player’s score, but chasing lines doubles it again. Clearing a line is the only way to get space back, so a placement that clears a line now is almost always better than one that looks neater.

The last two rows are the refinements. Before committing to a spot, check that the other pieces in your hand will still fit afterwards. Then, among the spots that pass, prefer the one that does not leave a single empty square boxed in on all four sides, because a lone hole can only ever be filled by the 1×1 piece. Those habits add another 10% or so to the median and raise the best games from about 750 to over 1,000.

Keep the middle open

People often say to fill the edges first. We tested both directions. A player that prefers squares far from the centre scored a median of 400, no better than one that does not care. A player that prefers the centre scored 185: less than half.

The asymmetry makes sense once you know what kills you. A slab needs a 2×3 patch. Near an edge, a patch can only extend one way; in the middle of the board, a 2×3 can be placed in many overlapping positions, and every row and column through the centre is shared by more possible slab spots. Clog the centre and you remove the squares that the most slab positions depend on. The centre-first player died with the middle 3×3 of the board 89% full; the edge player, 44%. You do not have to build on the edges; you just must not build in the middle.

Chasing combos is another trap. The centre-first player had a higher share of multi-line clears than any of our line-chasing players, and still scored worst of them. The 5-point bonus per line is small next to the cost of setting it up. Take doubles when they come; do not build for them.

Bigger boards, longer games

The same careful player scored a median of 361 on 8×8, 451 on 9×9 and 558 on 10×10. On the small board the slabs are relatively bigger, and each clear only buys back eight squares, so the first slab with nowhere to go arrives sooner. On 10×10 there is simply more room for a 2×3 patch to survive somewhere.

Practice

The practice game opens a 9×9 board whose very first hand is the three worst pieces in the set: the 2×3 slab, the 3×2 slab and the big 3×3 corner. Place them against the walls in a way that leaves the middle of the board open and a line close to clearing, then keep asking the slab question with every piece after that.

The board is never full. It is just the wrong shape.

▶ Play Block Fit🎯 Start with the three biggest pieces