Bejewelled2

(App, USA)

A board game, on a 8x8 board, full of fields of six colors (represented as different jewels, to give it a theme and remind of several similar games in the past), where at every move (which consists of swapping places of two adjacent fields horizontally or vertically) you must line up three of a kind in a row. They then vanish and the fields above fall into the vacant spots, all the way up, and new ones appear on top. Scoring 4 in a row gives you an exploding gem which will later clear a 3x3 field around itself; 5 leaves a different one which can match any color, a wildcard; once used, it makes all the gems of that color vanish.

Go had this game on her iPhone (or was it iPod?) when she visited in december 2008. I wanted to buy it myself, but it cost 10$ for PC and 2,50$ for Macs and iStuff. The easiest way to get me pissed off (in PC speak, deurinated) is to discriminate against me by some silly marketing scheme. So I never bought it, but for the next 8-9 years found places where it could be played online. On the last one I was the world champion among the few dozen people who still bothered to play it. My top score was above 2 million.

Then around 2016 that website simply unlisted the game. The old link would still work, but the game on the page just wouldn't load, and my record stayed as it was. Then later I'd remember from time to time to find it again, and I'd find something similar, but no cigar, and I'd quit that soon. As late as in january of 2024 I found it again, on some russian site, and it wasn't the same game anymre, someone reconstructed it, i.e. wrote it from scratch. It has a couple of twists - on the plus side, if you make a cross or a T, it gives a bomb which, when activated, deletes everything in its row and column. The minus is that the score above the requirement for the current level doesn't count against the next level, you start each from zero. In the original game the surplus would sometimes suffice to automatically pass the whole second or third level.

And the scoring is only roughly the same. By end of 2024 my top score was about 9,7 million on fourtysometh level.

---

Mentions: 06-XII-2008., 29-III-2009., 02-VI-2009., 03-XI-2010., 23-VIII-2011., 17-X-2011., 02-IV-2014., 05-IV-2015., 25-I-2024., 16-II-2024., 14-V-2024., 31-V-2024., 28-X-2024., 25-III-2025., 14-V-2025., 09-XI-2025., Gorana Sredljević (Go), in serbian

11-XII-2019 - 8-IV-2026