How to play Carillon: the rules in two minutes
Learn to play Carillon, the chain-reaction puzzle: tap a dot, its ring pops every dot it reaches, and each pop is a note. Hold first to read, then clear the field.
The Carillon blog
Tips, strategy and how it's made
How to play, how to find where every chain starts, and what goes into a puzzle game built by a two-person team.
Seven beginner tips for Carillon: reach, sources and decoys
Seven practical tips for new Carillon players: hold before you tap, read the reach circles, find the dot nothing reaches, and see through the showy decoys.
Calm by design: why Carillon has no timers, lives or energy
Carillon has no timers, no lives and no energy, and no ad ever interrupts a chain. Why we built a chain-reaction puzzle that waits for you, and where you will notice it.
Chain reactions as graphs: the maths behind a Carillon tap
A Carillon field is a directed graph, a chain is a shortest-path search, and the fewest taps is the number of source components. The maths, explained plainly.
How Carillon's levels are made: grown, proven, never repeated
Behind the scenes: how Carillon grows its fields, proves the fewest taps, measures difficulty in bits, and makes sure no two levels feel like the same one.
How Carillon's hint works, and when to use it
Carillon's hint lights the best next tap from wherever the field is now: it dims the rest, sweeps out the dot's reach and outlines what its ring will pop.
Made by two: a human and an AI building a puzzle game
Carillon is made by a two-person team: Shravan Goswami and Claude Opus 5.5, an AI model by Anthropic. How the work is split, and a few stories from the build.
How to get three stars in Carillon, and what the spare tap is for
How Carillon scores a level, why every level gives you one spare tap, and a simple method for finding the three-star read, with a worked two-tap example.
Why every pop is a note: the pentatonic idea behind Carillon
In Carillon a dot's colour is its note and its size is the octave, on a pentatonic scale, so any chain sounds like music. How the notes are chosen and made.