Merge Variant Game

Rules

• Click a number to collapse all connected numbers equal to it into one of the next number up.
• New numbers spawn at the top of the grid. Which these are depends on which numbers you already have.
• Occasionally bombs will spawn instead. You can't berge bombs, but if two bombs touch each other, they detonate, destroying all of the orthogonally adjacent numbers.
• You can win by getting rid of everything other than 0s (and bombs). This won't necessarily always be possible though, depending on random chance, so just try to survive as long as possible.
• If you lose, it's better to have a high score. If you win, it's better to have a low score, and winning is always better than losing.

About

This game is based on Merge by Https. There were just a few things about the original that I found unsatisfying and wanted to change:

• The tiles have numbers rather than arbitrary shapes.
• If you manage to remove all of a high number, spawning of the number below that is disabled again.
• The lack of a win condition in the original didn't bother me that much, but it was a natural consequence of the previous change.
• Bombs don't disappear if they reach the bottom of the grid. (They're more important in this version than the original, so I wanted to make it easier to keep them around.)

I'm not actually sure my version is better, but it was worth a try. I find it more relaxing, since I know I'm not inevitably progressing towards losing. The balancing seems okay, except that whether it's even possible to win depends heavily on the random number generation. Surviving for as long as possible is more the goal than actually winning is. When I tweaked the spawn probabilities to make it more consistently possible to win, I found it less fun, so I changed it back.

My personal high score is around 500 (win), but given how chance-based it it, high scores for winning don't make a whole lot of sense. You could get a score of 2 (win) just by getting extremely lucky. High scores for losing do make more sense, but I haven't been keeping track of mine.

Copyright: by 4Denthusiast, CC BY (Yes it's a near-clone of someone else's game but game mechanics aren't copyrightable. This is just for if you for some reason want to use my implementation.)