10 Billion Blocks

10 Billion Blocks is a short incremental game about taking a cube-shaped planet apart to find what's sealed inside.

Click to break blocks. Spend the coin on Miners who mine alongside you, and on picks hard enough to reach the next layer down. Orbit the planet, hunt for ore, break into whatever's buried in it, and take the whole thing away until only the thing at its heart is left. Then warp to the next planet with everything you own and do it again, bigger.

Every click has a radius

A click removes the block under your cursor plus everything inside its radius, measured from the exact point on the face you hit rather than from the middle of the block. Clip a corner and you take a handful. Bury the cursor in a flat wall and you take a bite out of it. Blocks pay coin according to what they were made of and how deep they sat, so the same swing is worth more the further down you are working.

Hire Miners and post them where you want them

Miners cost coin and mine on their own for as long as you're playing. Drag one to set a Posting, a work anchor that biases where it digs, and you can keep several of them on one shaft while you go and open a face somewhere else. They are also the only thing in the game you can lose. A Miner caught in an explosion is destroyed outright, and the coin that hired it does not come back.

Six layers, and a hardness wall at each one

Every planet is six layers deep. Each layer has its own material and its own hardness, and your pick has a ceiling above which a block cannot be mined at all. Upgrading the pick is what opens the layer below, which is why a planet gets read from the outside in. On the way down there are ore seams to trace, geodes to crack open, and buried structures whose rooms stay sealed until you breach a wall.

Burning, frozen, wet

The pieces you recover from a planet are weapons, and firing one leaves blocks in a state. Fire a second piece into that state and you get something neither of them does alone:

• Shatter, when burning meets frozen
  
• Melt, when burning meets impact
  
• Chain, when anything meets wet, and the blast runs along the water instead of using its own shape

Explosions set off buried TNT. Cut the support out from under a mass and the whole thing detaches, pays out in full, and lands hard on whatever is beneath it. None of this is required, and every planet can be cleared without triggering any of it, but the fastest run is the one that comes apart on its own.

The upgrade tree opens from one root

One level in a parent unlocks its children, so nothing ever has to be maxed out. Locked upgrades stay on screen with their prices, and you can always see what you are saving toward. They add to a number, multiply it, or unlock something outright, including new shapes for what a single click takes away.

Clear the planet and take a piece with you

At the heart of every planet is a relic, built out of material nothing can remove. Peel away everything breakable and the relic is what's left standing. Each one is different, and you take exactly one piece of it, leaving a hole that stays there for the rest of the game. When the last breakable block is gone you move to the next planet, which is bigger, carrying everything you own: coin, Miners, upgrades, and every piece you have taken. Nothing is lost on the way and nothing is left behind.

The campaign is finite and has an ending you can reach. Everything is in one build, with nothing held back for later.