Nojong is an arcade mashup of Tetris and Mahjong that brings a new twist to falling block puzzlers: the ability to freely swap blocks between the field and a supply of 9 blocks in your hand.

Nojong was created with GameMaker Studio 2. The soundtrack is by Anton Corazza (composing) and Yusef Kelliebrew (drumming).

In Nojong, you clear like-colored blocks from your hand to boost a multiplier. After a set number of clears, whatever is left in your hand is scored, and that score is multiplied by your multiplier.

This creates an excellent tension between trying to boost your multiplier for as long as possible, and trying to curate your hand for the best base score. If you wait too late to curate your hand, your final score will suffer. If you curate too early, you'll miss out on a higher multiplier.

Nojong is heavily inspired by Mahjong, which is a game with an extremely convoluted scoring system. Once you understand Mahjong, trying to score winning hands is fun and rewarding, but getting to that point requires memorizing a lot of arbitrary rules and exceptions to those rules.

The core of Nojong's scoring is its symmetry multiplier.

Blocks in your hand are always sorted by color. Similarly colored blocks form groups like doubles (two of a kind), triples (three of a kind), etc. If the composition of these groups are symmetrical across the Y axis, your hand is deemed symmetrical and gets a 2x multiplier.

This one rule enables for all of the on-the-fly creativity of Mahjong, without needing dozens of specific named hands to memorize.