The Supaplex and Emerald Mine games can be considered clones of Boulder Dash themselves, although they have added elements, including explosives, acid, locked doors with matched keys, and more. Amoeba can be dangerous and unpredictable, but also occasionally useful for several reasons of too few diamonds, or if you need to destroy a monster.

Some destroyed monsters drop gems necessary to achieve the necessary number to complete the level. This is sometimes useful, as the player can drop things on top of monsters (butterflies and fireflies) roaming the levels. Rocks and diamonds can rest on dirt, walls (only indestructible and slippery/magic walls), or other rocks and gems, but once these are removed (or the space next to them), they will fall down. Diamonds can be collected by moving into them. The levels are filled with dirt which can be dug simply by moving through it. The Boulder Dash game involves collecting a set number of diamonds after which an exit door opens through which the player can enter the next level. Rocks'n'Diamonds can also read native levels from the games Emerald Mine, Supaplex and Diamond Caves II.

There are currently more than 50,000 levels available on Rocks'n'Diamonds-related pages. Rocks'n'Diamonds features gameplay elements from all the games mentioned above, usually in the form of sub-games, although levels can feature combinations of elements from any of the games mentioned above, as well as new ones. The game was later ported to various platforms, for instance in 2014 to the OpenPandora handheld. Since 2014 the source code is available via a Git repository. The native Emerald Mine game engine is based on an older version of Emerald Mine for X11 by David Tritscher, which is used to read and play all native Emerald Mine levels. The DOS version is based on code by Guido Schulz. With its release in 1995, it is one of the earliest games available for Linux, and it also runs on MS-DOS, Windows, Unix, and Mac OS X systems.

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