Newstris is an online browser game that plays the classic retro Tetris formula with a twist: the pieces you are stacking are the news. When you start a game it reads the live RSS feed of the outlet you picked, and each of today's headlines becomes a falling block, one word per cell.

So the pieces are never the same twice. A headline of three short words drops as a neat little square; a long one comes down as an awkward slab you will have to rotate twice and still regret. Play in the morning and again at night and you are stacking two different front pages.

And the blocks are not decoration. Every one of them still points at the story it came from, so a headline that catches your eye is one click away from the full article on the publisher's own site. That is the whole idea: a way of skimming the news that feels like an arcade cabinet instead of a feed.

On a computer, ← → move the headline, ↑ rotates it, ↓ pushes it down and space drops it. On a phone, swipe in that same direction and tap a falling headline to read it.

• Clear a row: 100 points, and four rows at once are worth 1,600 rather than 400.
• Click or tap a falling headline: the game pauses, the original article opens in a new tab, and that headline is worth 1,000 points when you come back.
• Every ten rows you go up a level and everything falls faster.

Reading is worth more than stacking, which is deliberate: the game pays you for being curious about a headline, not just for fitting it. You get three lives; when a headline has nowhere left to go, the board is swept clean and you carry on with the score you had.

There is one setting that changes everything, on the start screen: gaps to clear a row. Headlines are irregular shapes, so a perfect wall-to-wall row is a rare thing. Leave it at three and the game is generous; drop it to zero and you are playing real Tetris rules with pieces that were never designed for it.

Ten outlets are ready to play out of the box, covering world news, business, technology and entertainment:

• BBC
• Al Jazeera
• SCMP
• Times of India
• Futurism
• TechCrunch
• Ars Technica
• TV Insider
• El País
• Reuters

That list is only a starting point. The game has a website editor: write one line per source in the form domain - URL with any RSS feed, and it becomes a new button on the start screen. Your local paper, a niche blog, a sports site, a feed in your own language — anything that publishes RSS works.

Your list lives in your own browser, so the game remembers it next time without asking you for an account. Your best score is kept there too.