Masterpile is a drop-and-merge puzzle set in a museum gallery.

Aim along the top of a dark-wood jar and let a round painting fall. When two identical paintings touch, they merge into the next one up the ladder, and the pile shifts and tumbles to make room. Keep the jar from overflowing for as long as you can.

Eleven moments in art history, smallest to largest:

1. An ochre cave handprint
2. The Eye of Horus
3. An Ionic column capital
4. A Byzantine gold halo
5. A sfumato smile
6. A blue turban and a pearl earring
7. A water lily in pastels
8. A starry swirl
9. A red, blue and yellow grid
10. A pop-art face in Ben-Day dots
11. A drip-splatter canvas

Make two drip-splatter canvases touch and they burst in a splash of paint that clears everything around them.

Eight art sets, all open. Tap the painter's palette to repaint every piece in another set. The rules never change, only the pictures:

• Ink and Gold: Japan, from a flame-rimmed clay pot to a great wave, a crane and a gold-mended ink circle.
• Stone and Bronze: sculpture, from an ivory lion-man to a discus thrower, a bronze thinker and a polar bear.
• Bestiary: animals in art, from a cave bison to a tiger in the jungle, blue horses and a peacock.
• Stone to Feather: the Americas, from a colossal stone head to a jade mask, a dancing skeleton and carnival feathers.
• Stars to Storm: the old masters, from a starry Gothic vault to a face made of fruit, a wanderer above the fog and a storm at sea.
• Dot to Burst: the modern movements, from a field of tiny dots to golden mosaics, a black square and floating circles.
• Crab to Bull: the zodiac, drawn as an old star atlas, smallest creature to largest. Here the final burst is a splash of water and two leaping fish.

Fourteen puzzles. Open the puzzle wall from the jigsaw piece. Each puzzle is a jar already half full, a short queue of exactly the pieces you need and one goal: make a certain piece, clear one out of the jar, or set off three merges. No spare drops, so every piece has to land in the right place, and the later puzzles ask for merges against a wall, in the right order, or a piece parked out of the way until it is needed. Solving one opens the next, and your solved puzzles are saved between visits.

Every run paints a picture. Each merge leaves a stain on the linen canvas behind the jar, in the style of the piece you just made and the set you are playing. When the run ends the canvas becomes a finished painting in the style of the furthest piece you reached, framed in gilt and hung in your own gallery, saved in your browser between visits. Sign your first one, then open any canvas fullscreen and share it as an image.

No words, no numbers. There is no text anywhere in the game. A gallery wall across the top hangs each piece the first time you make it, and a bar fills toward a golden frame as you merge. The room around the jar moves through the ages with you, from a torch-lit cave to a white modern gallery.

Every piece, frame and stain, in every set, is painted by the game's own code: homages in the spirit of each period and of artists long in the public domain, never copies of real artworks. Made for an AI game jam.

On your phone too. Masterpile: Art Merge is free on Google Play, with a daily leaderboard: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.it_erate.frameline

Controls

Plays in the browser on desktop and phone.