Sure, those games have random elements but the randomness doesn’t dominate the game. Based entirely on their moves, can you tell an expert player from a novice? If we’re talking about Sudoku, Tetris, or Mahjong, you can tell right away if someone knows what they’re doing. You can test this by watching someone play. It’s a never-ending cascade of participation trophies. You feel like you’re making stuff happen, but it’s ultimately shallow and sad.
WONDERFUL! (chimes) COMBO! (sparkle sound) SPECTACULAR! (rushing sound) COMBO×5! (fireworks) They cover this up by making the game easy and making lots of sounds and colors and particle effects. You’re now playing a game dominated by chaos.
But this has the side effect of making the game even more chaotic and random. This sort of fixes the problem, in that the board no longer gets “jammed”. Maybe something to clear a row or column to get the board moving again. Maybe use a “bomb” to blow up a 3×3 section. Maybe press a button and destroy all the red ones. I'm the best bejewler ever!Īs a way to fix the above problem, the games will add some sort of power-ups or specials. I blew up half the board by clicking on shit at random.
That keeps the play going, but to me it seems to indicate a fundamental problem with the design. The band-aid solution is for the game to reset the whole board if it detects the player is stuck. They don’t have any control over what drops from the top. What happens then? Should the player lose? It’s not really their fault. It’s actually possible for there to be no valid moves on the board. So not only is the game random, but it gets less interesting over time. Sure, I can match these three red ones or these three blue ones, but who cares? They give the same points and I have no control over what new pieces will drop from above. Your options get fewer and fewer.Įventually there aren’t any decisions to make. The inescapable trend over time is for more and more of the board to lock up. But no matter how well you play, you’re not going to change the contents of those bottom two rows. So then you play a couple of rows above the bottom.
Eventually the new pieces will be in an arrangement where the bottom two rows just won’t have any valid swaps. You can only swap adjacent pieces, and you always want to do the lowest swaps possible. Make the LOWEST matches you can, because matches at the bottom of the board will cause large changes to the rest of the pieces and increase the odds that all of that moving around will create more accidental matches and combos. Since random moves score better (over time) than planned moves, it means that rather than look for the “best” (largest) match, your optimal strategy is you just watch the bottom of the board. So playing randomly is superior (in terms of score over time) to playing judiciously.īroken thing #2: The game is at the bottom. But you could also spend those two minutes just randomly clicking on shit and you’ll get even more points. Sure, you could spend two minutes carefully studying the board to discover the one perfect move that will cause a chain of matches. The vast majority of these combos are not things you orchestrated. The game strongly rewards this sort of thing. It’s very likely that these new pieces will create additional matches, which will remove more pieces, which opens up more space, etc. When you clear some pieces, everything settles to the bottom, which opens up space at the top where new pieces fall in. We're on Bejeweled 3 already? Isn't it about time for the dark gritty reboot?
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