How to Play

Tap a free tile to pick it up, then tap its twin to clear them both. Free tiles sit at full brightness with a warm outline; tiles that are covered or wedged between two neighbours are shaded, and tapping one tells you it is blocked rather than doing nothing. The four flowers all match each other and the four seasons all match each other, so those eight tiles are the most flexible in the set — a small F or S in the corner marks them. HINT lights a legal pair and SHUFFLE rebuilds the tiles still on the board into an arrangement you can finish; you get three of each and both cost points. Every deal is generated backwards from a finished board, so a solution always exists at the start — but four identical tiles can still be split the wrong way, which is what SHUFFLE is for. On a keyboard, H hints, S shuffles, N deals a new board and Escape drops the current selection.

Tips

• Work the stacks downward before you clear the edges. A tile buried under the raised middle cannot come out until the tiles above it do, and on the Turtle the single crown tile and the four beneath it gate the whole centre of the board — spending your early moves on the outer rows feels productive and leaves you with a tall pile and nothing legal to take.
• When three or four copies of the same face are free at the same time, take two of them straight away rather than matching one against a tile you have just uncovered. Splitting a group of four across opposite ends of the board is the single most common way to deadlock a deal that was perfectly solvable, because the last two copies end up needing to be free simultaneously and never are.
• Hold the flowers and seasons back. Any flower takes any flower and any season takes any season, so those eight tiles are the only ones in the set that can rescue you from an awkward position — clearing them first because they are easy throws away your flexibility while you still have plenty of ordinary pairs to work with.
• Score is banked pair by pair rather than only on a clear, so a board you abandon halfway still records what you earned, and matching quickly in succession adds a rising streak bonus on top. Hints and shuffles are flat deductions that no amount of play can earn back, and the Turtle and Pagoda pay far more per pair than the Courtyard does — so the honest way to a high score is a bigger board cleared with no help, not a small one farmed for easy pairs.

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