BLOCK BLAST!

Chip Genung ‘25 (Co-Editor in Chief)

Kids love their games, and, for most kids, including Westminster students, the simpler the better. Block Blast, fits this bill precisely. Often confused with Tetris, Block Blast involves moving colorful geometric shapes to get a row – either horizontal or vertical. When you manage to clear the board, you receive bonus points, and each time you complete your inventory of three shapes, a new one appears that you must use. If you run out of space for your shapes, you lose. Intense, I know. My high score is about seven thousand, but I have heard of a few Westminster students with a high score upwards of twenty or thirty thousand. 

As with most games, those who play longer, develop the necessary strategies to do better. Regardless, it is still a simple game fundamentally. This leads to a larger point about culture at Westminster, and among most teenagers; there is always a new game everyone is obsessed with. Sometimes, just within Westminster, and sometimes nationally or even globally. These games always have certain things in common: they are mobile games we can play on our phones or computers, and they’re fast and extremely simple. One primary example of this before Block Blast was Get MIT, a game based on the game 2048, where one merges blocks representing colleges, working up the ladder of prestige to MIT. Similar to Block Blast, it involved minimal effort and thought and could be done while one enjoys their favorite TV show or listens to music.

​But as with the games themselves, their trendiness is fast as well. Block Blast will most likely fade, just as its predecessors of Get MIT and what is simply known as Watermelon, another mobile game. But, for now, Block Blast reigns as the go-to phone game, prized by Westminster students for its simplicity.