Block Out! Ads: One Year to the Top of the Puzzle Charts
Block Out! - Color Sort Puzzle reached the top of the U.S. iOS charts in about a year. Inside the buying structure behind it: Meta's four surfaces taking most of the coverage, India as the anchor market, and a library built almost entirely on fresh creatives.
Daniel Brooks
Creative Strategy Analyst
Published
Updated
Block Out! Ads: One Year to the Top of the Puzzle Charts
By Daniel Brooks · Creative Intelligence Reports · October 16, 2026 · Data window September 16 – October 16, 2026
Recent industry coverage put an unfamiliar studio name at the top of the U.S. iOS charts - two sort puzzles from the same Turkish publisher, one of them barely a year old. What that coverage does not show is how the newer of the two bought its way there. Block Out! - Color Sort Puzzle turned one on September 30; its first year ends with a statement of intent: in the last thirty days the Grand Games title kept 2,992 deduplicated creatives and 7,478 tracked ad plans in rotation across 14 networks and 69 markets - and only 162 of those creatives are flagged as re-invested. Where its stablemate Magic Sort! recycles proven units, Block Out! is built on new material: 94.6% of the creatives in the window are fresh.
Network mix: Meta carries the account, and it is one plan set
Audience Network, Facebook, Instagram and Threads each cover exactly 4,680 plans - 62.6% of the account. Identical counts across four surfaces are the signature of one plan set syndicated across all of them. Unity adds 1,673 plans (22.4%), Messenger 1,519, AppLovin 759. AdMob - the backbone of Magic Sort! - covers just 65 plans, 0.87%.
Ad-plan coverage by network (multi-attribution)
Markets: India opens, Europe fills in behind it
India is the anchor: 1,873 plans, and 1,640 of them target India exclusively - by far the largest exclusive pool on the account. The next nine markets (GB 798, FR 664, NL 632, DE 630, AU 624, CA 621, CH 611, SE 589, JP 585) all sit between 8% and 11% coverage. The Google Play record carries no meaningful cumulative download figure yet - this is a first-year build in every sense.
Top ten markets by plan coverage
Formats: film and playable in equal measure, images almost none
Using the wider lifetime-overlap attribution (3,101 format records against 2,992 deduplicated creatives), videos account for 1,578 records and playables for 1,520 - an even split - while static images barely register at 3. The playable library splits between Unity (58% of playable records) and AppLovin (35.3%); the video library's weight sits on Unity and the four Meta surfaces.
Format records (lifetime-overlap attribution, total 3,101)
September 28 is the standout day: 123 new creatives and 1,194 new plans - more plans in a single day than AdMob carries across the entire window. September 22 added 748 plans, September 21 another 538. The first-year build has been a series of surges, not a steady drip.
Creative Spotlight
Spotlight 1 · The rainbow slide, running since June
AppLovin · video · 60s · active Jun 21 – Oct 15 · est. lifetime exposure 2.90M · not re-invested · 1 plan · 56-market target list.
The largest unit in the window is a 60-second record on a pink background: concentric arcs of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and pink blocks, the line "I can't reach colors.." fixed at the top, and a hand sliding a blue block into place. There is no story and no cut - one screen, one mechanic, one caption family held for a full minute. It has run on a single AppLovin plan since June.
Spotlight 2 · The playable that opens with "I can't reach yellow"
AppLovin · playable · active Jun 27 – Oct 15 · est. lifetime exposure 2.44M · not re-invested · 1 plan · 55-market target list.
The playable opens on the Block Out! logo over blue, then drops into a candy-brick wall under the line "I can't reach yellow" - a caption variant of the same family as the films. The interaction is the real slide-and-clear mechanic. Like the top film it has run on one plan since June, and at 2.44M exposure it is the second-largest unit in the window - the film-playable pair at the top of this account are both single-plan, long-run units.
Spotlight 3 · The Mintegral striped-board record
Mintegral · video · 60s · active Jul 20 – Oct 6 · est. lifetime exposure 1.69M · not re-invested · 1 plan · 48-market target list.
A pink board with three vertical color bars - red, yellow, blue - against a checkerboard field, the same "I can't reach colors" caption, a hand sliding black blocks out of the path. Mintegral is a small slice of this account's plan coverage, but it carries one of the top exposure units, and the target list here runs 48 markets including the US.
Spotlight 4 · The 30-second spiral
AppLovin · video · 30.0s · active Jul 28 – Oct 15 · est. lifetime exposure 1.68M · not re-invested · 1 plan · 56-market target list.
The only sub-60-second film in the top five: a violet-grey board with a rainbow spiral of blocks, the same caption family, and a hand dragging a blue piece along the edge. It is the short-form cut of the same idea as Spotlight 1 - same caption, same interaction, half the runtime.
Spotlight 5 · The AppLovin board-puzzle record
AppLovin · video · 60s · active Jun 24 – Oct 11 · est. lifetime exposure 1.64M · not re-invested · 1 plan · 56-market target list.
A wooden board with red, yellow and blue columns against a black-and-white checkerboard field, the caption unchanged, the hand sliding pieces to clear a path. All five spotlights share one caption family and one mechanic - the variation lives in palette, board shape and runtime, not in concept. That consistency is the creative signature of this first-year build.
Lifecycle read: a first-year build, stated as one
Block Out! is a 2025-09-30 release finishing its first year. Everything above is framed as launch-year structure: the 162 re-invested creatives are a small share of a young library, the Meta weight is a channel decision for a new title, and the September surges are sharp bursts rather than a steady build. No spend, CPI, ROAS, install or conversion claims appear in this piece, and none can be derived from tracked plan counts.
Data notes and limitations
All figures come from CreativeScope tracked ad records for the window September 16 – October 16, 2026. Exposure figures are global lifetime estimates for creatives active in the window - not period increments, not country-level, not comparable across windows. Market and network coverage is overlapping multi-attribution; shares never sum to 100%. Format records use a wider lifetime-overlap attribution (3,101 records against 2,992 deduplicated creatives) and are reported separately. Grand Games maintains two tracked records for Block Out! (this report covers the 2025-09-30 record with 2,992 creatives; a 2026-09-08 record with 87 creatives is never merged). A menu-stage snapshot from October 15 (3,136 creatives / 7,419 plans) is retained as a drift baseline only.
FAQ
As plan coverage, yes - 62.6% across four surfaces that carry identical 4,680-plan counts, which indicates one syndicated plan set. AdMob covers just 0.87%, the inverse of its stablemate Magic Sort!.
Why is India the top market?1,873 plans point at India and 1,640 of them are exclusive to it. Coverage of where plans point is not a statement about installs or revenue.
What does "new creatives only" mean here?Only 162 of the 2,992 creatives in the window carry a re-invested flag - 5.4%. The top five units by exposure are all non-reinvested first-run material.
Five spotlights, one caption family - is that typical?For this account, yes. Every top unit runs some variant of the "I can't reach the colors" line. The variation is in palette, board shape and runtime; the concept is constant.
Explore the records on CreativeScope, read more in the blog archive - including Magic Sort!'s AdMob-first machine and June's Journey at nine years - or query directly through the MCP interface.
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