Apart from Player Versus Player, there are three modes to choose from:
- Survival, which has you start with a fresh, clear board and place randomly-generated jewel sets. The goal is to keep the game going for as long as you can, with rewards given at determined intervals. This is the only mode to feature Difficulty Levels. After filling the gauge to the board's right, a special set of silver orbs drop instead of normal gems; these destroy all jewels of the same color that they land on, and can be reused by stacking at least one of the orbs above the screen's edge. Progression is determined by your earned score.
- VS. CPU pits Ruby/Jade against a band of thieves seeking to acquire the jewels themselves, with their reasons for doing so not shown until the very end. After The Reveal, the game's Big Bad becomes Princess Dazzle's cousin, Pinch, who enlisted the thieves' help in her goal to complete her own kingdom's Columns Crown. She is not referenced in the other two modes. Filling the gauge causes one of your ability jewels to drop, which, when destroyed, can help you or hinder your opponent in various ways.
- Flash Columns, where Ruby/Jade must clear preset jewels to reach and destroy one or more jewels with a white outline before progressing forward. There are fifty stages total. Every fifth level is called a “Challenging Stage,” which are actually closer to
Breather Levels than anything else. After clearing five, you are awarded one jewel to the crown, and are allowed to resume playing at the next stage without penalty. note
In all of those modes, attaching jewels of the same color vertically, horizontally or diagonally causes them to disappear. With enough skill or luck, Combos can be created, which, in Survival and VS. CPU modes, gives an increasingly bigger boost to the bonus gauge. Regardless of mode, if the middle row reaches the top of the screen, it's Game Over.
Tropes present in Columns Crown include:
- Ambiguous Gender: Jinx. Its Victory Pose has it do something akin to a Pec Flex, but the pecs don't look entirely pec-like.
- Artificial Brilliance: Chaining becomes commonplace not long into Vs. CPU mode.
- Artificial Stupidity: Then again, several of the characters are utterly idiotic.
- Some will commit suicide by stacking the middle row of their playing field past the screen when the sides are practically empty. They usually do this within seconds of the match starting. Happens the most with Princess Pinch.
- A few of the abilities not only add extra rows of gems to the opponent's field, but do the same to the user's. Jinx can occasionally kill itself this way. Then there's the ones which swap your boards, which, due to their overlapping brilliance and stupidity, can leave them in a worse position than you.
- Big Bad: Princess Pinch, Dazzle's cousin.
- Big Fancy House: Dazzle possesses one, being a princess and what not.
- Black Magician Girl: Ruby is one, if her status as a Sorcerer is to be believed on the character selection screen.
- Combos: How good you are at chaining gem combos is a stat in Survival mode. Some gems are also locked behind getting high enough combos in Survival mode. Also, combos act as a gem multiplier in CPU VS. mode.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: if you die in Flash Columns mode or VS. CPU mode, you can just continue.
- Elegant Gothic Lolita: The main antagonist, Princess Pinch.
- Endless Game: Survival mode.
- Event Flags: according to the manual, meeting certain conditions in one mode can unlock things in the others.
- Excuse Plot: Princess Dazzle wants dem jewels.
- Falling Blocks: Rather than the typical Tetris style of game-play, each set of blocks drops in vertical threes, and cannot be rotated; instead, pressing A or B causes the order of blocks to shuffle downward or upward.
- Foreshadowing: The person that walks past while Princess Dazzle is asking for her classmates' help is her cousin, Princess Pinch, who has similar goals.
- Gem-Encrusted: The crown.
- Gemstone Assault: Judging by how the cover depicts Jade and Ruby fighting two of the thieves, this is how things go in VS. Mode behind all the Falling Blocks.
- Gender-Blender Name: Jade is a boy. No, that's not usually a boy's name.
- Girlish Pigtails: Ruby sports them in addition to a dress in contrast to Jade, her male, player-character counterpart, who wears shorts and sports short hair instead.
- Gotta Catch Them All: Rather, gotta collect all of the gems. There are 24 in total, and the game starts out each player character with 2 different ones. Good luck figuring out how to get all of them on your own.
- Gratuitous Ninja: The second opponent in VS. CPU mode.
- Guide Dang It!:
- Getting all of the gems. You can get most of them by playing all of the modes well enough. 2 gems (different for each character, but both obtained the same way) in particular qualify for this trope, however, for not being obtained via normal gameplay and not being hinted at all. Specifically, the two gems in question are locked behind winning 5 multiplayer matches (each match lasts until one player wins 4 times) and pausing in survival for 5 minutes after passing the 1st stage. No other gems have similar requirements.
- One of the stats in Survival Mode is "Magic." The closest the game gets to explaining this stat is a randomly dropped hint about using black gems twice (without referencing how it connects with the Magic stat), but otherwise Magic in Survival isn't explained at all. Not increasing it makes getting the highest ranking impossible. note
- High-Class Gloves: Princess Dazzle has them.
- Its Upto You: Dazzle finds four of the crown's gems, and then just kind of shuffles the responsibility onto you.
- Luck-Based Mission:
- Flash Columns can become this, since only the Challenging Stages have absolute patterns to the jewel sets.
- Luck is literally a stat in Survival Mode.
- Magic Skirt: See the box art on this very page for an example. Ruby's dress always bends strangely when she sits. This even applies to the end screen in-game after collecting all of the gems, where Ruby sits on the floor in front of a chest of gems with Princess Dazzle nearby. This trope is averted in Ruby's Victory Pose, where her dress seems to magically lift up to better show off her knickers.
- Match-Three Game: Vertically, horizontally or diagonally—as long as it's a straight line, it counts.
- Mineral Mac Guffins
- Modest Royalty: Not only does Princess Dazzle wear a simple white dress in more royal situations, she wears a uniform when at school.
- Nintendo Hard: The fact that you can't rotate block structures should tell you this.
- Power-Up Motif: Activating a technique jewel in VS. CPU causes a short theme to play.
- Rank Inflation: The highest rank in Survival is "Master".
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: Flash Columns can range from hellishly difficult to ridiculously easy, just by going from a normal stage to a Challenging Stage. For evidence, the very first Challenging Stage can be cleared without the player even pressing any buttons.
- Socialization Bonus: You can trade your jewels with those of other players. Beating someone 5 times in multiplayer VS mode is required to get all of the gems without trading.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: There is no possible way Princess Pinch could be pressing the control pad so quickly that she recovers from the Paralysis effect in a matter of two seconds.
- The Voice: Princess Dazzle's mother is the one who tells us about the crown and how we need all of the gems, but we never see her.
- Timed Mission: Flash Columns usually features a limit of 3–4 minutes, with the Challenging Stages dropping that to just ten seconds.
- Victory Pose: Ruby jumps for joy when she wins in CPU mode, while Jade blows a bubble upon victory. Ruby's pose is particularly notable, because players can clearly see her knickers of all things under her dress at the height of her jumps.
