Pixel Blast

Every blast is squared

Eight pairs cost you eight moves and pay 160 points. One blast of 16 cubes costs a single move and pays 1,280. The rule behind that gap is simple: a blast scores the number of cubes, times itself, times 5. A pair pays 20, three cubes pay 45, four pay 80, and eight pay 320. Double the size of a group and you quadruple what it's worth. With only 40 moves in a run, most of your taps should be setup, and only a few should be paydays.

Here's roughly how that plays out. Tap nothing but pairs and a run ends around 1,000 points. Grab the biggest group on the board every turn and you'll land near 4,000. Pick each tap for the group it creates next, and scores around 10,000 become normal. There's no timer, so take a real look before each move. Tapping a lone cube costs nothing. A tap made while cubes are still falling isn't lost either. The game holds your latest tap and plays it the moment every cube has landed, on whatever cube settles in that spot.

Reading the fall

Cubes only fall straight down, and new ones drop into the top of each column. Clear something low and everything above it shifts, which often pushes two same-color pockets together. Clear something high and nothing below it moves at all. So when you're hunting for a merge, work low. When you're protecting a big group you've built, spend your in-between moves above it.

A small example makes it concrete. Picture one column with three blue cubes at the bottom, two reds on top of them, and two more blues above the reds. Blast the red pair for 20 points, and the top blues fall straight onto the bottom three. That's a group of five, worth 125 and a rocket. Tapping the two blue pieces separately would have paid 20 and 45, with no rocket at all.

Boosters change the board in very different ways. A sideways rocket is surprisingly gentle. It clears one full row, so every column drops by exactly one, and any group sitting above that row slides down in one piece. An upright rocket swaps a whole column for nine random new cubes. A bomb drops three neighboring columns by up to three rows each, which scrambles everything along their edges. A prism punches holes all over the board at once.

Boosters: where they land and what they pay

A blast of 5 cubes forges a rocket, 7 a bomb, and 9 a prism. The new booster appears on the exact cube you tapped, then falls with the rest of its column. That means you pick where it ends up by picking which column of the group you tap. Each rocket has an even chance of facing either way, and the icon tells you which before you fire. Pointing up, it clears its column. Lying on its side, it clears its row.

Boosters score 10 points for each cell they clear, counting themselves. A lone rocket always pays 90. A bomb pays 90 in the open, 60 against an edge, and 40 in a corner. A prism clears every cube of the most common color, usually around 20 of them, for roughly 200. A rocket or bomb that hits another booster sets it off too, and every cell in the chain counts. A prism removes cubes only, and a normal cube blast never sets off a booster sitting next to it.

Why hoarding backfires

It's tempting to bank boosters for a big finish. Don't. A booster isn't a cube, so while it sits on the board it splits any color group that tries to grow through it. Saving every booster for the last few moves costs you points. You'll score more by firing each one as soon as it's the best move on the board. Boosters still sitting there when your 40th move is spent score nothing at all.

Your final moves are plain arithmetic. A random board's biggest group is usually 6 cubes, worth 180. A ready-made group of 9 shows up only about once in every twelve boards, so prisms get built, not found. On your last move, a prism's 200 or so beats most groups, while a lone rocket's 90 loses to any group of 5, which pays 125. If you like the tap-a-group idea but want a board that empties, try Same Game. It drops no new cubes and pays a 1,000-point bonus for clearing everything.