How to Play Rosette

Rosette is a free online stained-glass bubble shooter rendered on an HTML5 Canvas inside a gothic cathedral — for fans of Bejeweled and Candy Crush who enjoy match-cluster cascades with no download required. A hex grid of jewel-toned glass orbs — ruby, sapphire, emerald, citrine, and amethyst — fills the upper play area beneath a band of pointed arches and a faint rose-window backdrop. An ornate organ-pipe shooter waits at the bottom of the 480 × 620 board: three brass pipes, with your next bubble parked in the slot beside them.

Move your mouse (or drag your finger) to aim, then click or tap to fire. Aim is clamped a few degrees short of horizontal on both sides, so every shot travels upward. When three or more same-color bubbles connect they shatter in a burst of glass shards. Any bubbles left without a path back to the ceiling row then cascade away for a bonus. Every few shots the whole field descends one row, and the run ends the moment a bubble reaches the pulsing red line near the bottom of the canvas. Your score is sent to the leaderboard when the run ends — whether that ending is a bubble crossing the line or the fifth level coming down clean.

The Five Levels

Rosette runs five levels, and each one tightens a different screw. Level 1 opens with four rows drawn from just three colors — ruby, sapphire and emerald — and gives you seven shots between descents. Level 2 adds a fifth row and citrine as a fourth color, with the counter down to six. Level 3 brings amethyst in for the full five-color palette across six rows and drops to five shots. Levels 4 and 5 stack seven and eight starting rows against a hard floor of four shots per descent, so late levels arrive faster than a careless shot can clear them.

Clearing a level means clearing it completely — the last bubble has to leave the grid, and there is no partial credit for thinning the field. When it happens the rose window behind the board wakes up, its twelve petals lighting one after another before the pale center fills in, while a panel totals the level for you: bubbles cleared and the points they paid, how many cascades you triggered and what those were worth, the level bonus, and your running total. Then the next field builds and the shot counter resets.

Rainbow and Bomb Bubbles

Two special bubbles enter the shooter queue as you climb. Rainbow bubbles start appearing at level 3, roughly one shot in fourteen, drawn as a slowly rotating hue gradient. A rainbow does not match everything it touches: when it lands it reads its six neighbors, takes whichever color is most common among them, and pops as that color. Land one against a single neighbor and it becomes that color; land one in a gap with no colored neighbors at all and it simply sits there as dead weight.

Bomb bubbles unlock at level 4 and are drawn as a dark orb with a pulsing red core. A bomb ignores color entirely: it destroys the cell it lands in plus every bubble touching that cell — seven at most — for 15 points each, and the usual cascade check then runs on whatever it cut loose. Both specials are decided by the same roll, so once level 4 arrives bombs are the more common of the two by some margin.

Tips and Strategy

• Hunt 5-cluster pops over 3-cluster pops. A 3-bubble cluster scores 30 points (10 each) but a 5-bubble cluster scores 125 (25 each) — patient setups that build a larger same-color group before firing pay disproportionately more per shot.
• Engineer disconnects for cascades. Every bubble that loses its path back to the top row falls, and each one pays 5 points. Popping the group that anchors a wide overhang can drop far more glass than the pop itself removed, and the cascade is scored separately with its own floating total.
• Watch the descend counter, not the clock. The middle of the HUD shows how many shots remain before the field drops a row, and it turns red at two. Nothing in Rosette is timed, so work to that number instead of hurrying: spend the shots before a descent on the highest rows, where a clear buys the most headroom.
• Save rainbow and bomb bubbles for the densest clusters. A rainbow inherits the most common color among its neighbors, so fire it into a spot bordered by one big group rather than a two-color seam. A bomb takes its landing cell and the six around it regardless of color, which makes it the only tool that reliably opens a packed, badly mixed field.
• Bank shots off the side walls. The canvas edges bounce a shot cleanly, and because aim is clamped upward, a wall bounce is the only way into a pocket sitting behind a protruding group.

Scoring

• 3-bubble cluster: 30 points (10 per bubble)
• 4-bubble cluster: 60 points (15 per bubble)
• 5+ bubble cluster: 25 points per bubble
• Cascade drop: 5 points for every bubble that loses its ceiling connection
• Bomb blast: 15 points per bubble destroyed
• Level clear bonus: 200 × level number

Controls

Mouse: move to aim, click to fire. Touch: drag to aim, lift your finger to fire. The keyboard covers the rest — Space fires the loaded bubble, R restarts a run from level 1, and M toggles sound. There is also a speaker button in the top-right corner of the canvas, and the mute setting is remembered between sessions along with your personal best. Switching browser tabs pauses the run and dims the board; a click or tap brings it back. On a phone the canvas scales to the width of the screen, and the game gives a short haptic pulse on a pop, a cascade, a level clear and a game over.