Trouballs

• Title — Trouballs • Developer — Paragon Five • Producer — Capcom Entertainment • Released — September 26, 2001 • Genre — Puzzle • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Game Boy Color

• Illustration — A screenshot depicting the puzzle gameplay. Similar in design to Tetris and Puyo Puyo, Trouballs requires players to match balls of the same color into boxes of four or six, which then disappear. Players manipulate the balls on the screen through turning wheels. Additional features include falling balls, moving winches and gears. The game has two modes: a "set number" mode with a fixed number of balls on screen, requiring the player to arrange them into rectangles until they vanish; and "ever more balls", in which balls keep falling into play and the player must prevent the screen from filling up before the time limit expires.

Paragon Five was founded in 1999 by Paul Bragiel, an entrepreneur and game developer from Chicago, Illinois, who had spent the mid-1990s deeply involved in the demoscene. It was through Bragiel's demoscene connections that the Wrocław team behind Trouballs was assembled. Pawel Kopinski, who served as the studio director, later described the game as the starting point of his entire career in the industry, recalling that he and several colleagues from the demoscene came together under Bragiel's Paragon 5 banner specifically to build it for the Nintendo Game Boy Color.