Tile-matching video game casual games, tile-matching games are designed to be easily accessible and easy to play, which conflicts with a traditional video gaming ethos that demands games to be challenging and punishing. Match-three games are NP-hard when generalized to an n × n playfield and played such that the player knows in advance all the tiles that will appear, with no random chance involved. In particular, it is NP-hard to determine: Tile-matching video game A tile-matching video game is a type of puzzle video game where the player manipulates tiles in order to make them disappear according to a matching criterion. In
Tile-matching video game game mechanic, rather than a distinct genre of games. The mechanism of matching game pieces to make them disappear is a feature of many non-digital games, including Mahjong solitaire and Solitaire card games. Jesper Juul traces the history of tile-matching video games back to "Tetris" and "Chain Shot!", published in 1984 and 1985. While both focus on pattern matching, they differ in important design points such as time pressure, tile manipulation and match criteria. A second generation of influential matching games – "Puzznic", "Columns", "Dr. Mario" and "Plotting" – was published in 1989 and 1990. Games building on "Dr. Mario"'s