Bejeweled Blitz Secrets to Success

I've heard it said on message boards that the best way to get better cascades (where many groups of three or four gems fall and explode at the same time after a single move) is to begin at the bottom of the board! Focus your energy there in the beginning of the game.

Remember, if you're playing on Facebook or MySpace you only have One Minute (as that deep-voiced man likes to remind you!) so you have to hurry!

A few thoughts about hurrying:

Once you've found a set of three to create, move your eyes immediately away from that set (even as your mouse is still moving to move that gem into place) and look for the next set of gems that will fit together. Keeping your eyes on the group of gems you just demolished is a natural thing to do, but it's deadly to your score. You absolutely MUST keep your eyes ahead of your last move! Even if you explode a power gem and hear the announcer saying "Good Job" or "Excellent" or "Incredible!!!" - DO NOT stop to look at the falling gems - while you're hearing those words move your eyes to find the next set that can be made. This is absolutely imperative.

Power Gems, where you've created a group of 4 gems and that color gem starts sparkling, are a pretty great tool to get higher scores. However, when you get more than one sparkling gem on the screen it can be really distracting! You do need to hurry to get the next set busted, but don't get caught up in the pretty sparkling gems so much that you lose a few seconds...remember, you only have 60 of them, and they go by FAST!

Generally speaking, the game seems to be set up so that if you explode a power gem you're going to get a multiplier gem after the explosion and subsequent cascade. After playing a couple thousand games of Bejeweled Blitz you start to notice that these multipliers will drop with their matching gem colors near them in many cases, or to where they can be matched up with one or two moves beneath or beside the multiplier gem. Keep your eye out for those, however, if there is NOT like-colored gems near the mulitplier - keep moving across the board! Do not linger or you're wasting precious time.

You can get a maximum of a 6x multiplier; one every ten seconds. Remember, it may be wise to wait a few seconds to explode a sparkling gem so that you get 2 multiplier gems on the board, rather than exploding every sparkler you've got and messing with the ten-second-rule for multipliers!

Hypercubes, or Hyper Cubes, can be a little confusing at first. The first thing that you need to know is that a Hyper Cube is created when five gems are exploded at one time. You can swap a Hyper Cube at any time after creating it. To do this, just treat it like any other gem. When you do this, it will explode all gems on the board that are the color that you swapped.

Some things to keep in mind are that it takes about 3 to 5 seconds to use a Hyper Cube, during which time you cannot make any other moves. During this time scan the board for moves you'll be able to make once the Hyper Cube has finished exploding like-colored gems.

If you have a Multiplier Gem on the board, and are able to swap your Hyper Cube with a color that's the same as your Multiplier Gem, choose to do that first. If you do not have a Multiplier Gem on the board, try to wait until you have built up a large number of like-colored gems on the board so that you can explode MORE THAN 12 gems. Remember, doing that creates a Multiplier Gem! You will almost always get a multiplier when you use your hypercube, but it's good to check the board to make sure that it does look like there are 12 just to be safe and not miss out on the Multiplier opportunity.

Sometimes it's good to save the Hyper Cube until the last few seconds of the game. Unfortunately, using a Hyper Cube is dramatic, looks cool, and makes some great noise, but it doesn't always give you a great score in the end, especially if you didn't have enough gems to make a Multiplier, or if you didn't switch it with a color that also had a sparkling Power Gem (those will explode the 9 cubes around them when set off by a Hyper Cube!)

Of incredible importance to getting a higher score is to KEEP MOVING. Your Speed Bonus is very important! If you can't immediately make a match in the same area that you were in before, quickly move another match into position elsewhere on the board JUST to keep that Speed Bonus! The Speed Bonus goes up to 1,000 points, so for every gem you explode you do the math - 1,000 points for each gem multiplied by whatever multiplier you've last busted. Of course, if you're still at 1X, then you're not going to get anything but the speed bonus, and probably not get a score higher than 25,000 to 35,000.

Other things that can help with building your score on Bejeweled Blitz:

Keep the volume turned up (unless you're at work, then put your headphones on!) This way, you can hear that when you bust a set that your Speed Bonus is active. (It will be a higher-pitched sound.) There's also something quite psychologically encouraging about hearing a power-gem explode, and the resulting cascade!

If you have the money, and feel like doing so, you can always download the game from www.popcap.com. I found that it helped my score a lot because I didn't have the pressure to show up on my Facebook Friend's Ladder at position number 18 looking like a loser every single time. Now I'm always in the top three! They have Bejeweled Blitz for Mac and for PC, and it has a few different types of games in it, but if you're just trying to get your Facebook score higher, then concentrate on the timed games.

Remember that you always have the option of using the HINT button, just keep in mind that you shouldn't keep looking at the HINT button after moving your mouse cursor over it; get your eyes back on the board immediately to see where the hint light will show up, telling you where to move next.

An excellent way to gain about 1/2 of an extra second (which could make an big difference in your score) is by making your first move before the "splash screen" goes away.

Another useful thing that I do so as to not waste my time, as well as to increase the amount of time I have to actually get a good game, is to stop the game at approximately 30 seconds and restart it if I have not yet created a 2x multiplier. If you haven't created a multiplier by that point, you're most likely not going to get a score higher than 25k to 35k, and that's on a GOOD day. If you're like a lot of people, you won't see scores higher than 8,000 without that multiplier!

An easy way to stop your game due to no-multiplier - is to press the big MENU button, then MAIN MENU, and then YES, and then PLAY NOW. Seriously, after you do that a few times it will only take you about 2 seconds to get to a whole new game where you actually DO have a chance of making some great scores.

Good luck, and remember, this game is incredibly addictive! It's been reviewed by blogs and magazines as being highly addictive, so don't feel bad if you can't stop playing it. You're just like everyone else.

Take one look at this photo and tell me if this is something you'd want to see on your Facebook wall, or your MySpace page? No, it's not. There are those that think Smack Talk is funny, but mostly everyone in the entire world gets annoyed with it and secretly wants to unfriend you (for a fleeting moment your own MOTHER would want to unfriend you for Smack Talking her about Bejeweled Blitz, and you know it!) It's just not necessary. Another point to make is that some people just simply don't have brains that work the way Bejeweled Blitz needs them to work. This doesn't mean they're idiots - it just means that they're better at something else. There's absolutely no need to tell them that you're better than they are at this game, especially since your score is on their Friend's Ladder, staring them in the face every single time they play. That ladder is there for a reason, it motivates people to keep playing! However, Smack Talk, makes them want to say "forget it."

Good luck to all my fellow Bejeweled Blitz Obsessed Buddies!