A retail adaptation of the 1990 shareware puzzle game Stained Glass (Game), developed by the author of its Macintosh port, Tesserae revamps the graphics and interface while adding new board layouts (known as "mosaics") to choose from, new difficulties, a "tournament" multiplayer mode, and a new tile (the gray "Tertiary" tile, which is comprised of all three primary colors together).
Like the original Stained Glass, Tesserae challenges players to clear as many tiles of different colors/shapes from the board by jumping over other tiles, similar to peg solitaire. However, there are specific criteria to follow based on whether colors are mixed or not.
The game later received ports by Eurocom for DOS PCs, as well as the Game Boy (Platform) and Game Gear (Platform), in 1993 (all published by GameTek in North America and Europe). It also received a Japan-exclusive NEC PC-98 release by ASCII on March 27, 1992.
It later received a modern iOS and macOS release in 2009-2010, with a free-to-play, ad-supported Android (Platform) port by Tarkus released in 2014. Full information about these releases are sparse.
