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Hello! Lilibi here for another Petal Crash lesson. I want to thank Viz for providing this space and preparing these lessons for me.
I was a bit, ah, short on time to prepare them myself. Books don't shelve themselves...
No matter! Today we'll be taking a look at chain patterns! Recognizing some of these will help you better strategize in a match.
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The first, most basic one we'll look at is a straight chain. I think you know what's going to happen here.
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You slide the top red block down, then crash! The red blocks vanish, and pushes the blue block down.
Then the blue blocks crash, and push into the yellow block. Easy peasy!
Oh, but those yellow blocks? There's no room for them to move! Will they crash too?
Yes, they will! Just getting the block moving in the direction of a touching matching block is enough to trigger a crash. It doesn't have to actually travel!
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Now let's look at this playfield. Will the blue blocks travel and crash into the yellow blocks?
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Ah, no! It looks that because the blue blocks crashed and vanished, they never moved onto the yellow blocks.
That's something important to keep in mind for next time! A straight chain stops when there's two of the same color next to each other.
And we can fix that in a single move, by pushing that bottom-most blue block down, so it touches the yellow one.
This doesn't mean the whole chain stops, just that straight section. We can always turn!
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The next one up is the corner chain. These are also pretty simple, I'd say. You just...
Ah, wait. Which one do I move? Red, or blue? I don't want to have to guess.
Well, let's look at the direction the blocks will move. If we start from the blue block, we end up pushing the bottom-most red block left, into the wall.
But if we start from the red block, it'll push the left-most blue block to the right, into the other blue block. A chain!
That's important, because it turns out corner chains only work in one direction!
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Sometimes you'll be in a situation where you'll need to choose whether to keep a straight chain going, or whether to keep a corner chain going.
This one is a bit tricky, because the blue/red corner will turn into the straight chain on the top row, which stops right there with the two red blocks in a row. The yellow blocks never crash!
And we can't start from the yellow blocks either, because those won't move the red block anywhere.
But what about those [X] blocks? Can we get out of this sticky situation if we remove those?
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If we can manage to get rid of that one on the left, then...
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We can push that red block there down! Now the chain can complete!
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But what if we can only get rid of the [X] block on the right? Can we make it out of this?
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y, , ,r,b,
Well, if we push the right-most red block down, and then push the other red block to the right, it completes the corner, and the chain is complete!
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y,p8,x, , ,
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y, , , ,b,
It, uh, gets a bit trickier to do this if you have to worry about new blocks spawning in. By the time you clear this up, you might have even more clutter!
And, sometimes there's nowhere good to put a block. What do we do with the green block when it spawns?
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We shouldn't do the easy move and push it left, because then we can't finish the yellow part of the chain.
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y, , ,p2,b,
One option is to push the green block up and left out of the way, like so.
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y,b, ,p2,g,
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y, , ,p4,g,
We could also move blue left, green down, and then blue up and right back mostly in place.
Oh, but look at that purple spawn. We've already used up four moves, and we haven't even cleared up the top part of the chain!
If this were a real board, with more blocks spawning, we'd be in a heap of trouble...
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If it looks like your chain's just going to get harder and harder to pull off as blocks pile up, it's often best to just cut your losses and start while you still can.
Then you'll have lots of room to try again, with your new blocks!
That wraps up today's lesson. I hope I taught this well! I'll be back sometime soon, with a new lesson from Viz.
(She told me she wrote an entire lesson plan up. I have a lot of prepwork to do...)