248Link - Completed

While that 248Link game is hugely redundant after a while, it is relaxing to drag snakes of numbered tiles and try to complete each level.  You get 30 coins for each completed level, with the option to get up to 20x if you watch an ad.  Since the power-ups all cost 300 coins to use, I will watch the ad if I have <3000 of those coins, otherwise skip it and continue.  This is enough to make sure we never get stuck.

There is some strategy to that 248Link game after all.  Sure, you can swipe the longest combos to clear a lot of the board, but sometimes you should keep an eye on exactly when the new piece goes up a tier as you are making that combo.  And there's no point making a 96 tile if there are no tiles near it to make future combos with.  The board can fill up with non-matching tiles if you don't keep a close eye on which numbers you are merging.

Try to make combos that are one or two points above the next tier.  For example, five 2s would equal 10, but 10 is not a valid tile, so you get the next tile up, and 10 is more than 8, so you get a 16 tile.

Because of this, a set of 8 blocks might only add up to 64, but if you do it two smaller steps you might get three 32s, which give you a 128 tile instead.  It all depends on where in the middle of your combo the future block levels up.

I always try to keep my top tile near bottom center, and instead of long swipes that give small values, try to clump a bunch of intermediate values above it, like eight 48s, then merge those 48s into a much higher value as close to my top tile as possible.  Again, there's no point getting a nice big tile in a far-off corner or a bunch of smaller values that don't come together as needed.

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Since their info page only goes up to the "bz" tier and then shows an infinity tile of some kind, I was wondering what would happen if you actually play for that long.  It turns out that when you merge two "853 bz" tiles, you do get an infinity tile.  

 

It feels like at this point I have beaten the game.  But you can keep going.  If you merge tiles into the infinity tile, it just eats them.  Or you can try and make more infinity tiles.  Yup, that works.

But at this point, the level never ends, so you won't be getting more coins.  You are guaranteed to run out of coins and run out of power-ups, and soon the screen will jam up, finally ending the game.  Or you pay to keep going, but why.

As far as I'm concerned, I beat the game and can move on to something else.  

Overall, the game does what it says and is a good time filler app for short breaks here and there.  I found it interesting that they went with the exact values of all those powers of 2, with hidden decimal places, so in some tiers two 2s will give you a 6 instead of a 4, because those tiles actually have a value of 2.7 and two of those is 5.4 which is more than 4.  It does make it a challenge to recognize the best matches.  So I would categorize it as a quirky big numbers game.