Merge Magic (app)

I suppose I could call this ongoing series "apps I was thinking about taking off my tablet to make way for new apps, but then tinkered a bit and figured I could keep them for a while."

I played Merge Magic a bunch about 3 years ago.  It's fun just dragging the groups of 3 matching items together to get the next tier of that item, or match 5 to get two of the next item.  3 tier 1 things = tier 2, 3 tier 2s (which takes 9 tier 1s) = tier 3.  These are simple powers of 3, so let's look at some higher tiers: tier 8 = 2187, tier 9 = 6561, and tier 10 = 3^9 = 19,683 tier 1 items.  That's a lot of dragging.  But numbers are easy to lose track of.

There are at least 20 sequences of items, and I have seen up to tier 8 of most of them.  If you want to tackle a sequence, you really need at least a 4x3 space to line them up and merge them: four rows or columns of 3 to fit the numerous items of the first four tiers.

There are also about 20 species of creatures you can breed from eggs and merge into higher level creatures.  Along with tons and tons of token offers, cash offers, bonus offers, bonus offers that only look like bonus offers until you see some of the items are not included.

 

Here's a zoomed-out shot of my cluttered Garden.

Overall, it's colorful and fun, and the game consists of mostly a series of puzzle levels, plus your Garden where you get to freestyle whatever items interest you and you get little helper creatures who fly around your Garden "helping".  At first, the puzzle levels were fun little challenges, but you quickly run out of whatever weird gems you need to keep playing those.  So then the Garden was the main focus, and I built that up and paid for the few land expansions that were available.

But after however many sessions, my Garden is so cluttered there isn't even room to move, and I have about 25 creatures flying around spreading more items I don't have room for.  Then I win a bonus chest on some level that explodes into even more stuff I have no room for.  So I really don't go to the Garden anymore.  There are no more useful places to expand it, and unlocking land by level is out of balance.  I need to breed and merge about 12 more levels of creatures to get what looks like 10 hexes of land, then level 700-something for a few more hexes .... AND you have to clear those hexes, which at this point are mostly blocked with 500 or 1000 points of curses each.

 

Close-up of one corner of my Garden, with my stumps & logs, orbs, weird obelisks and such

So, I sometimes go poke at the big events, because the game puts up a massive new world of about 500 progressive blocks of things you have to clear, and that's fairly relaxing.  There is some puzzle solving, with seeds that fly overhead and clouds that rain down into pools that you can merge into bigger pools ... and witch castles and weird mushrooms ...

So, my Garden is overwhelmed and I never have enough gems (compasses) to play more than two new levels per session, but the special event maps sometimes draw me back in for an hour, mostly to see what new stuff they might have added.  With these special levels, there is a nice bonus that there are blackened spaces with keyholes, so if you can find an item that matches the silhouette and drop it there, it opens up a small patch of new land.

The starting corner of last week's special event.  Just work on clearing the world.

11/15 - I rediscovered how to click and sell off your clutter items.  The icon at the very lower left pops out a little tab that identifies the items you click on and lets you sell them for a few coins each.  Because you wouldn't sell the top tier items, now would you?  It's okay for some mindless clicking every now and then.