i'm practicing a perfect clear setup in tetris that has a 74% chance of working if you do it right
and i never know if i did it wrong or if i rolled low
basically you build this shape (or the same thing mirrored) and 74% of the time you can place your next three pieces in such a way that you get a perfect clear (depending on how the second bag starts and what [if anything] you have in your hold slot)
@monorail Hmm. We've never played anything newer than the original Tetris; what's the second bag?
@Rosemary basically every licensed tetris game since like 2001 has used what's called a "7-bag" randomizer. what that means is that it gives you all the pieces in a random order, then once you've received all the pieces, it gives you them all again, etc, etc.
it's analogous to if i had a bag with all the pieces in them, and drew them out one by one, and then put them all back in and repeated. you're never going to get 5 O pieces in a row because there's only one in the bag
so the "second bag" is just the eighth through fourteenth pieces that drop, which is guaranteed to have one of each shape
@monorail Oh, interesting. I suppose that makes sense, but it also means you can't get five O pieces in a row and get a free line or two.
@Rosemary yeah, but it also means you never go longer than 13 pieces without the I block you desperately need
modern tetris is also designed with multiplayer balance in mind, and this style of randomizer helps with that. it simultaneously means that
- no one player gets screwed and hands the other a win
- skilled players get to invent and learn techniques that (for example) guarantee them an early t-spin, or give them a 74% chance of a perfect clear
@Rosemary a perfect clear is just any line clear that results in your matrix being completely empty, as a super contrived example, the first image here would be a perfect clear, while the second would not because it leaves stuff behind
a t-spin is a way to move a T piece into a slot that it wouldn't fit into IRL, using the fact that pieces don't actually "rotate", they just teleport into their rotated position. (example in the third picture)
both these techniques earn a lot of points and send a bunch of garbage lines to the opponent (which are lines that appear at the bottom of their playfield, completely full except for one missing block somewhere)