Jewel Galaxy

Yesterday I discovered a game named Jewel Galaxy. It is a puzzle game developed by Gamepocket studio. The game is available for iPhone and iPad.

In this game you match 3 or more jewels to collect them. In each level you are given a task. You are either limited by time or moves and you need to achieve a certain score or break golden borders. At the beginning of your game you have certain amount of hearts. When you fail one level you lose a heart. If you ran out of hearts you need to wait 30 minutes to get 1 heart back so you can continue playing. You can also buy the hearts but that costs real money. With money you can buy some other stuff that can help you in your quest. To get to a third constellation you need to pass three challenges but you can pass one challenge a day. That was not funny! But on the other hand the game is completely free. You pay with time as usual...but in a different way. You pay with time that you cannot play the game. Quite odd but I like the idea.

In each level you'll see something as in the screenshot above. There are the gems you are collecting, stone, gems in stone, gems set in metal and other stuff. Anything containing stone can be broken using a pick icon. This does not cost a move AFAIK. The gems in metal cannot be broken but can only be collected (this gems being part of a triple or more..). A multicolored star works as any kind of a gem. Sometimes (in the level with time limit) you'll encounter frozen gems. You can break those by tapping them three times.

Some objectives like the one above need you to get a certain score in certain number of moves or less. In order to do that it is good to know the scoring system. If you make a triple you'll get three points. After you first three gems a 'multiplicator' indicated by yellow squares will go up by 1. This means that the points from the gems are multiplied by the number indicated. If you will be doing threes in succession the number can go up to 10. If you break your succession the number will go back to 1. You can make double or triple lines as well. Sometimes you get lucky because gems of the correct color will spawn at the correct place creating a line. You'll get points for that as well. Sometimes there are some flashing gems that will appear. One kind (with number above it) when used within 3 moves will give you additional 100 points. The other flashing gem will clear out the whole line in which you created your trio of the same gems - meaning extra points I guess. Knowing this you can set up your board first and then start creating lines with each move.

When breaking golden borders you'll be doing the same trio lines. When you get three gems next to each other they will disappear as usual but also the golden border will be broken. When the golden border is a solid line it needs to be broken twice. If dashed you just need to break it once. It's good to have some system. In such levels the score does not really matter that much.

If you like puzzle games this is one of the games that is fun and nicely done. The only thing I don't really like about it is the sound track you hear all the time. But sound and/or music can be turned off.