How to Fix a Match-3 Shuffle Not Triggering When No Moves Remain

A dead board is a soft-lock: the player can swap forever and nothing clears. You need an explicit no-moves detector that runs after every cascade, plus a reshuffle that guarantees a playable result.

How to fix it

1. Scan for any legal move

For each tile, hypothetically swap it with its right and down neighbor and run the match check. If a single swap produces a match, the board is alive; stop scanning.

2. Reshuffle when the scan fails

If no swap produces a match, randomly permute the existing tile colors across the cells. Reuse the same multiset of colors so the difficulty stays consistent.

3. Re-validate after shuffling

After reshuffling, run the no-moves scan again. Loop the shuffle until the board is guaranteed to have at least one legal swap, then return control to the player.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every GameMaker error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.