What makes a chain
One colour, cardinal neighbours only, and never the same dot twice: a chain is a path through a patch of colour, and it can never double back through a dot it already holds.
If you struggle to tell the dot colours apart, there is a shapes setting in the menu: each colour then carries a shape of its own as well.
A press starts a chain and it stays: moving onto a neighbour extends it, moving back retracts it, a second press pops it. Nothing else spends it, so walk a chain out to its full length and look at what it would leave before paying for it. With a finger, letting go pops.
Cubes
A chain is worth the cube of its length, times the multiplier in hand. Every dot you add is worth more than the last one.
The multiplier
Four or more banks one more on the next chain, up to nine. Fewer puts it straight back to one, and nothing else about a chain carries over.
A short chain is an easy find, but it costs you the streak. Four is the floor: take four over three wherever the board offers it, and spend a pair when the multiplier is already down.
Spending one on purpose is another matter. Top scores on the designed levels come from paying a pair early to move the board, dropping columns into a shape where the chains after it are all long, each one banking on the one before.
Listen to the board
The sound is a readout. With nothing in hand, every dot the cursor crosses says how long a chain could start there - a step up the scale per dot, up to ten - and a cell with nothing worth taking answers low, dull, and on another instrument. Endless is dealt to keep its matches from catching your eye, and this is how you find them anyway.
Two to listen for. The multiplier note is the receipt: no climb means you took fewer than four. The refused thud means the dot you reached for is a different colour from the one in hand.
The wobble
If you cannot find a match, wait for a wobble.
It points at the longest chain, which on a designed level is often the greedy pop that strands the board three moves later. Look where it points and then decide for yourself.
Four traps
All four look like free money.
The obvious play
Take the longest chain available, every time. It is the obvious way to play, and what the hint keeps pointing at.
So, in order of what they will save you:
- Count the colours before the first pop. Every dot is one you have to use. A colour down to a single dot is lost; a colour split across a gap needs a collapse to join it, and you have to keep the chain that does the collapsing.
- Pop low to move things, pop high to leave things alone. A chain taken out of the bottom of a column brings everything above it down a row. A chain along the top changes nothing else. Both are tools; the mistake is not knowing which one to use.
- Take the awkward colour first - fewest dots, or scattered furthest apart - while there are still dots on the board to move it with.
- Work backwards from the last chain. It is easier to see which colour has to be left standing in one heap than to find the right opening.
Mode by mode
Each one wants to be played slightly differently.
The ladder
There are two sets of levels and the button at the foot of the picker swaps between them: two ladders rather than one long one, each opening on a warm up and ending on the hardest board it holds. No board appears in both. If one of them has stopped being fun, the other is there.
The levels are loosely ordered by difficulty and carry two numbers. Par is the most any clearing order scores, and a star is given for reaching it. Floor is the least. Where the two are equal, how you play makes no difference and no star is offered.
Par orders is how many orders reach par: a 1 means one solution, which you will not stumble into. Greed pays is what taking the longest chain every time scores.
Solutions
An order that scores par for each of the 104 levels, animated. Each is behind its own spoiler, so nothing is given away by scrolling past.