Tower of Fortune

A jewelled board, a handful of moves, and one simple gesture: swap two neighbouring gems and watch a line of three or more of the same colour burst apart. Fresh gems rain down into the gap, and when they land in a row of their own they burst too — one swap becomes a chain, and a chain becomes a combo that clears far more of the board than you planned. Learning to read the board before you touch it is the whole craft of this puzzle. There are 30 levels, and each one sets its own goal under a strict move limit. Some ask you to reach a target score. Some name a single gem colour and ask you to clear a given count of it, which turns the board into a hunt rather than a scramble. Others bury stone tiles beneath the gems, and the only way to crack them is to burst a match right on top. The move limit is what gives every swap weight — there is almost always a lazy match available, and almost always a better one two columns over. The board grows as you go. Later levels widen the grid and add more colours, so the comfortable patterns of the opening stages stop appearing on their own and have to be built. Caged gems sit locked in place until a neighbouring match frees them. Two-hit tiles refuse to break the first time, so you need to plan a second burst in the same spot — often the same cascade, if you set it up well. It is an unhurried kind of puzzle. Nothing is timed, so you can sit with a tricky board, trace a cascade in your head, and only then make the swap. When a combo runs away from you and cascades down three or four stages at once, it is wholly satisfying — and when a level tightens to its last two moves, the quiet arithmetic of which gems to touch becomes genuinely tense. Easy to pick up in a minute, and gradually more demanding as the goals change shape. Line up three, set off the chain, and work your way up through all thirty boards.

Tower of Fortune