Panel de Pon
Panel de Pon is a tile-matching puzzle game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo, released in Japan in 1995 for the Super Famicom. It was localized for North America in 1996 under the title *Tetris Attack*, with the visuals reskinned to a Yoshi/Mario theme; the underlying game mechanics are the same puzzle engine later continued as the Puzzle League series (e.g., *Planet Puzzle League*).
Availability: Nintendo Switch Online — Super Nintendo Entertainment System app (Nintendo Classics)
This is a systems/mechanics guide rather than a linear walkthrough — a fixed step-by-step route isn't the useful format for a tile-matching-puzzle title.
Controls
The player controls a cursor that covers two horizontally adjacent panels on the stack. The A or B button swaps the two panels currently under the cursor — a panel can be swapped horizontally with an adjacent panel (including swapping with an empty space), but panels cannot be swapped vertically. The directional pad moves the cursor around the board. The L or R buttons can be used to manually raise the stack faster.
Rules and Systems
Panels continuously rise from the bottom of the play field (the "stack"); the player's job is to swap adjacent panels to line up three or more matching panels horizontally or vertically before the stack reaches the top of the field, which ends the game. Clearing more than three like panels in a single match is called a Combo, and scores bonus points. A Chain occurs when a cleared match causes panels above it to fall and trigger additional, separate matches in sequence; chains are rewarded with escalating fanfare and bonus scoring as chain length increases. When a Combo or Chain clears, the rising stack pauses briefly, giving the player breathing room. In versus play, performing Combos or Chains drops Thwomp-styled garbage blocks onto the opponent's stack, with the size or quantity of garbage scaling with the strength of the Combo or Chain that triggered it. Garbage blocks on a player's own board transform into regular, matchable colored panels once a match clears panels touching the garbage block.
Practical Strategy
Because chains reward escalating bonuses and send larger garbage payloads in versus play, deliberately setting up a board so that one swap triggers a cascading sequence of clears (rather than clearing matches as soon as they appear) is the central competitive technique in this ruleset, consistent with how Combos and Chains are described. Since garbage blocks only convert to clearable panels when an adjacent match clears touching them, targeting matches next to garbage on one's own board is likely the correct response to receiving garbage, though no dedicated strategy source was found confirming this beyond the general mechanic description.
Still confirming
- Whether the SNES/Super Famicom Panel de Pon release included a single-player story/stage mode structure distinct from the Western Tetris Attack version was not confirmed in the sources reviewed.
- Specific scoring formulas (points per combo size, points per chain length) were not located.
- Full character roster and any story-mode content specific to the original Japanese Panel de Pon release (as opposed to the Yoshi's-Island-themed Tetris Attack reskin) was not independently verified here.