Advanced Guide for Beating Your Friends in Bejeweled Blitz

Bejeweled Blitz is a fast-paced match-3 FaceBook application created by PopCap games. Though Blitz originally was designed to be a gateway to their site and a promotion for purchasing their other games, Bejeweled Blitz has become its own FaceBook phenomenon.

Friends compete with each other for the highest score by playing a classic Bejeweled board that lasts for one minute. The object of the game is to remove as many colored gems as possible by matching them in lines of three. The lines can occur vertically or horizontally. Lining up a greater number of gems or creating a combo by having multiple sets of gems break will provide additional points. The basic strategies for Bejeweled Blitz are not difficult, and they can be mastered with practice. This game depends heavily on pattern recognition which only gets better with more play.

If you still need to use the hint button often or cannot readily create Power Gems, keep practicing until you easily complete boards without using the hint button and can build Power Gems on a consistent basis. This advanced guide requires that both of those come easily to you before you begin competing at a higher level.

The Multiplier Gems are your ultimate goal in getting high scores. You want to create as many as you can as quickly as you can, and as soon as they show up on the screen, begin working towards getting them matched. You can also blow them up with a Power Gem or use a Hypercube on the right colored gems in order to get rid of them. Multiplier Gems multiply your score by the cumulative number of Multiplier Gems you have destroyed. Thus, each match becomes worth exponentially more. Keeping your speed bonus maxed and destroying multiplier gems are the fastest way to a consistently high score. In Bejeweled Blitz, you can play a great game, have a great board, and still end up with a low score due to having no Multiplier Gems destroyed.

Creating Power Gems on a consistent basis is the key to rapidly creating Multiplier Gems. In order to create Power Gems, you must create a match larger than a match 3 but smaller than a five gem match. You can do this by creating a straight four match either horizontally or vertically, or you can create one of the L matches which breaks a total of five gems at once but not in a row. Once you feel adept at creating Power Gems on demand, the next trick is to learn to create them close to each other. You can get them near each other by creating simple matches and reducing the number of blocks between them. Breaking two Power Gems at the same time will guarantee a Multiplier Gem drop unless one just dropped within five seconds.

To receive a high score, keeping the speed bonus (found at the top left corner over your score) is essential to beating your friends. Once the speed bonus starts at +200, you have 1.5 seconds to make your next match. Once you hit your first +1000 speed score, you have 2.5 seconds to make your next match. This is extremely difficult to gauge, so try to aim for no lag time between matches. You can start looking for your next match as you are completing the previous one or waiting for all the breaks to occur. It is, however, safe to take a second to look for the best match. Bejeweled Blitz seems to be programmed so that there is always a match on the board. If you start having a hard time finding a match, start looking towards the top three rows. Your matches will occur there. Though, at that point, it is very likely that you should simply restart on a different board.

You will not consistently place high against your friends based on luck alone, though there is an element of luck involved in the game. The boards do matter, but you can usually tell within the first 20 seconds of gameplay whether or not your board will be a winning one. I usually restart if I have not destroyed a multiplier within the first fifteen seconds of gamplay in Bejeweled Blitz, and if I have under 15,000 points at 35 seconds, I will also restart the board unless I just feel like practicing or am distracted. In order to restart, simply hit the green Menu button, and click Main Menu. You should be able to start a new board right away. This is also how you pause the game if you need abreak. Simply hit the Menu button and Back to Game when you are ready to continue.

What about Hypercubes? If you are adept at creating five-in-a-row matches, then by all means, use the Hypercubes in order to get Multiplier Gems by popping more than seven gems of one color at once. Simply switch the Hypercube with a nearby gem, but pick a color that has a lot of gems left on the board. If you get enough gems popped, then a Multiplier Gem will drop. I prefer to use Hypercubes to destroy Multiplier Gems or when I have several multipliers already. With just a x2 multiplier, each gem popped by a cube can be worth 600 points, and it gets larger quite quickly.

Again, all match 3 games are about pattern recognition. Before getting into higher strategies, simple practice along with our beginner's guide to Bejeweled can take you from scoring in the 20,000 to scoring consistently in the 50,000s. Then, using this guide, you will be able to score over 90,000 for most of your completed games. When the right board comes along, your scores will reach 150,000 to 175,000 easily putting on top of most of your friends. Now if only there was a strategy for winning one of the little Chuzzle dolls!