Bursty Box Jim: where to start the chain

Bursty Box Jim gives you one thing to do: tap a cube. What makes it a game rather than a toy is that the same board can be cleared in one tap or fail in five, depending on which cube you started with.

So the skill, such as it is, comes down to reading a board and finding the cube that does the most work.

Chains travel, so start where they can

A chain reaction needs somewhere to go. Set one off at the edge of the board and it fires inward and dies. Set the same one off in the middle of a dense cluster and it ripples in every direction at once.

Before your first tap, look for the busiest part of the screen and start there, not at the nearest cube. The cube you tap is worth almost nothing. What it reaches is everything.

• Start in the densest area, not the closest one
• Prefer a cube with neighbours on several sides over one on a wall
• If the board has two clusters, look for the cube that bridges them

That last one is the good move. A single cube sitting between two groups is worth ten cubes sitting inside one, because it turns two small chains into one big one.

Watch the direction of the blast

Cubes throw fragments outward, and where those land decides whether the chain continues. A blast fired along an empty row does nothing. The same blast fired along a full row keeps going.

You do not need to calculate it precisely. Just glance at what lies along the lines coming off the cube you are about to tap, and prefer the one with cubes in the way.

Do not tap while it is still going

Easy to say, hard to do. The screen is exploding, it is satisfying, and the instinct is to keep tapping.

Let the chain finish. The board you are looking at mid-explosion is not the board you will be tapping on a second later, and a tap fired into a half-resolved screen usually lands somewhere useless. You almost always have more taps than you have good boards, so spending one blind is worse than waiting two seconds.

Levels are short, so restart freely

A level here takes under a minute. That changes how you should treat a bad start.

If your first tap fizzled and the board is now scattered, restart. You are throwing away twenty seconds and getting a fresh clean cluster to read properly. Grinding out a broken board to a narrow fail costs you more time than the restart would have.

The one-tap clear

Most levels have a cube that clears everything. It is usually not obvious, and it is usually somewhere in the middle where several groups meet.

Looking for it is the actual game. Take a few seconds before your first tap and ask which single cube touches the most separate groups. Even when you do not find the perfect one, looking for it makes you pick a much better cube than the reflex tap would have.

The short version

• Tap into the densest area, never the nearest cube
• The cube bridging two clusters is worth more than any cube inside one
• Check what lies along the lines the blast will travel
• Wait for the chain to finish before tapping again
• Restart a scattered board instead of grinding it
• Spend a few seconds hunting the one cube that touches everything

It is a game you can play without thinking at all, and it is a lot more fun when you do not.