Power Mode is the long-form mode: a fixed ladder of 16 stages, played in order, on cubes that carry both blockers and powerups. It is the only mode where the board can hand you an advantage — and the only one where collecting that advantage is itself a puzzle.
Stages step through grid sizes 7×7 to 10×10, and within each size through 7, 8, 9 and 10 colours. Par for each stage comes from the same difficulty table the rest of the game uses:
| Stage | Grid | Colours | Par |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7×7 | 7 | 32 |
| 2 | 7×7 | 8 | 35 |
| 3 | 7×7 | 9 | 41 |
| 4 | 7×7 | 10 | 45 |
| 5 | 8×8 | 7 | 37 |
| 6 | 8×8 | 8 | 43 |
| 7 | 8×8 | 9 | 49 |
| 8 | 8×8 | 10 | 51 |
| 9 | 9×9 | 7 | 40 |
| 10 | 9×9 | 8 | 45 |
| 11 | 9×9 | 9 | 50 |
| 12 | 9×9 | 10 | 53 |
| 13 | 10×10 | 7 | 43 |
| 14 | 10×10 | 8 | 50 |
| 15 | 10×10 | 9 | 55 |
| 16 | 10×10 | 10 | 61 |
Read down the Par column and you will notice the ramp is not monotonic: stage 4 (7×7 with 10 colours, Par 45) is a harder puzzle than stage 5 (8×8 with 7 colours, Par 37), because adding a colour costs you more than adding a row and a column. Each time the grid steps up, the colour count resets to 7 and the difficulty dips before climbing again. Expect four waves rather than one steady climb — and expect stages 4, 8 and 12 to be the ones that end runs.
You get one life: lose a stage and the run ends. Progress is saved between stages, so you can stop and resume. Power Mode is open at weekends; on other days an optional ad unlocks a run.
Every Power stage seeds blockers at the same rate as the Challenge Cube — about 15% of cells, so roughly 44 holes on a 7×7 cube (294 cells) and 90 on a 10×10 (600 cells). Blockers never take a colour and never join your flood, and the routing tactics from the Challenge Cube guide apply directly.
Roughly 60% of Power cubes contain exactly one powerup; the other 40% contain none. When one is placed, the generator guarantees it has at least one non-blocker neighbour, so it is always physically collectable.
Collecting it is the interesting part. A powerup does not trigger when your flood merely touches it. It triggers only when every neighbour of that cell is either already part of your flood or a blocker — you have to surround it completely. On a cube, "every neighbour" includes neighbours across a face edge, which is what makes powerups on edges and corners awkward: the cells you need are on a face you are not currently looking at.
So a powerup is a small routing problem inside the larger one. Decide early whether you are going for it: enclosing a cell usually costs one or two moves you would not otherwise spend, and the payoff is worth it only if you spot the powerup while your region is still growing in that direction.
| Powerup | Effect | When it pays |
|---|---|---|
| Freeze | Refunds the move you just spent and makes your next move free — that move does not count against Par either. | Always. Two free moves is the most straightforwardly valuable pickup in the mode. |
| Rewind | Adds 2 undos to your stash. | When you are planning aggressively — undos let you test a speculative capture and take it back. |
| Starter | Lets you choose your starting cell on the next stage. | Late in a run. Picking your own start on a 10×10 board is worth several moves. |
| Scatter | Picks one colour still on the board and marks about half of its cells; on your next move those marked cells join your flood wherever they are, connected or not. | Immediately, and it is worth thinking about which colour got marked before choosing your next move. |
| Shuffle | Reshuffles every cell on the cube and switches your flood to multi-source, so your region grows from several places at once. | When the board has gone against you. It is a reset, not an improvement — the new layout is random. |
Freeze and Shuffle fire the moment you collect them. Rewind and Starter are banked: Rewind's undos stay with you, and Starter applies to the stage after the one you are on.
Start a Power run, or read the Strategy Guide and the Challenge Cube guide first — Power Mode asks for both skill sets at once.