Fortune Gem
A cascade-matching grid puzzle set on a fortune-teller's table, all velvet cloth and coloured stones. When the chain reactions land it is as good as anything in this genre. The problem is how often the game stops to talk to you between them.
Verdict. A solid, well-tuned cascade puzzle buried under the most intrusive interface in this batch. The puzzle deserves a better shell than the one it has been given.
Scorecard
Swaps register cleanly when they land, and the cascade animation has real weight. Marked down because an eight by eight grid is simply too dense for a small screen and mis-swipes are routine.
Almost everyone already knows how to play this kind of puzzle, and the opening boards get out of the way quickly. The special stones are introduced clearly, one at a time.
Individual boards are well sized for a short break and can be abandoned mid-move without loss. The forty seconds of celebration between boards is the only thing keeping this out of the eights.
The board designs stay inventive for a good while, but there is no reason to return to a cleared board and no scoring layer to chase. Once you stop advancing, the game is over.
Adverts stack on top of four separate celebration screens, the skip target moves between them, and the attempt refill offer arrives at the most frustrating possible moment. The lowest mark in the diary this year.
- Genre
- Cascade-matching grid puzzle, single-player, level-based with move limits
- Session length
- 90 seconds to 4 minutes per board
- Controls
- Swipe to swap two adjacent stones; long press a stone to see every match it can currently make
- Played on
- 3 GB budget handset and a mid-range 2025 phone
- Cost
- Free to play; frequent adverts between boards, plus optional cosmetic cloths and stone sets
What you actually do
An eight by eight grid of coloured stones sits on a cloth. Swipe to swap two neighbouring stones; if the swap creates a line of three or more matching stones, those stones clear, everything above falls down to fill the gap, and any new lines formed by the falling clear as well. That chain of automatic clears is the cascade, and it is the heart of the game — a well-chosen swap near the bottom of a loaded board can run for six or seven stages while you watch.
Each board sets an objective and a move limit. Early boards ask you to clear a number of one colour; later ones bury stones under layers of wax that need two adjacent clears to break, or place heavy stones that only fall and cannot be swapped, which changes the geometry of the whole board. The move limit is the real constraint, and it means the game is about setting up cascades rather than making matches.
Two special stones exist. Four in a line leaves behind a lens, which takes out its own row and column the next time it is matched. Five in an L or a T leaves an eye, and swapping the eye against any colour sweeps that colour off the entire cloth. Putting a lens and an eye together is the showpiece move, and most of the late boards are built around whether you can spare the moves to assemble one.
How it feels in the hand
Adequate rather than good, and the reason is size. Eight by eight is a lot of grid for a phone screen; on the older handset the stones are small enough that I mis-swiped at least once per board, usually diagonally, which the game reads as no input at all rather than as the swap I meant. It never cost me a move, but it broke my rhythm constantly.
The long-press match preview is excellent and, once again in this diary, switched off by default. Holding a stone dims the board and outlines every line it could join. On a crowded eight by eight board, that is the difference between playing the puzzle and squinting at it.
The cascade animation is where the game spends its polish, and it is worth it — stones settle with a small weight to them and the sound builds as a chain lengthens. It is genuinely pleasing and it is the reason I kept the game on my phone for the full fortnight.
Somewhere inside this app is a tight little puzzle game with three fewer pop-ups and a six by six grid. I would have scored that one considerably higher.
Session shape
A board is two to four minutes, which is right. Everything around the board is wrong. Completing a level produces, in order: a score tally animation, a chest opening animation, a progress map animation, and then frequently a video advert — roughly forty seconds of things happening at me before I can start the next board. Several of these can be skipped by tapping, but the skip target moves between screens, so tapping through blindly is how you accidentally open something you did not want.
There is a life system: five attempts, one consumed per failed board, refilling on a timer. Cleared boards cost nothing. I ran out three times across the fortnight, always on a board I was stubbornly repeating, and the game's response was to offer a refill in exchange for watching an advert. That is a clear and honest transaction and I took it twice. It is still the moment where the game is at its most insistent, and Ad Manners is scored accordingly.
Where the difficulty comes from
Move economy, and it is fairly done. The hard boards are the ones where the objective sits in a corner that cascades rarely reach, so you have to deliberately spend two or three moves building a lens near it rather than taking the obvious match in the middle. That is a real puzzle decision and the game is good at posing it.
What is less fair is that a small number of boards start in a state where the opening layout offers no useful move near the objective at all, and the reshuffle only triggers when there are no legal moves anywhere. On those, the first two moves are effectively wasted no matter how well you play. It happened perhaps four times in a fortnight, which is not often, but it is enough to notice on a board with a tight move limit.
Five pointers
- Switch on the long-press match preview immediately. Settings, second panel. On a grid this dense it is not an aid, it is the interface working properly.
- Work the bottom edge, not the middle. Emptying space near the floor pulls the entire column down after it, which is what gives a cascade somewhere to go. The identical match near the ceiling resolves and stops.
- Build the lens next to the objective, not next to your fingers. The whole difficulty curve is about reaching awkward corners. Spend two moves getting a special stone into the right column and the third move pays for all of them.
- Do not save the eye stone. Holding a special stone for a perfect combination usually means running out of moves with it still on the board. Use it on the second-best opportunity.
- Stop after a failure rather than repeating. The attempt timer punishes stubbornness, and the boards that beat you twice are almost always the ones you need to approach with a different opening rather than more determination.
Who it is for
People who already like cascade puzzles and have a high tolerance for interface noise. If the pop-up description above made you tired, the cleaner puzzle in entry 42 on Super Ace does a similar job with a fraction of the ceremony.
Published for information. Fortune Gem is a free single-player grid puzzle: no cash goes into it, none comes back out, and the numbers it shows you are the ordinary in-game kind. The write-up above was neither paid for nor requested. Thumbstick Diary has no relationship with the game’s developer or publisher and none with any app store, and the game’s name is used only to say what is being described.