Candy Crush Saga Advanced Strategy

By now you have probably heard of Candy Crush Saga. It's an addictive colour-matching puzzle game on Facebook and smartphones that has taken the world by storm, earning the creators upwards of $630,000 per day! If you like puzzle games, beware! This isn't affectionately called "Candy Crack" for nothing. It can be highly addictive and many people have spent way too much time on it. But for those willing to take that chance, I have written an advanced strategy guide to help you get ahead. There are already many guides floating around the interweb, but most are quite shallow, explaining basic game mechanics and giving the same basic hints. This guide aims to go a little deeper.

Introduction

For those of you who have played Bejeweled, Candy Crush Saga will at first seem like a cheap knock-off. But rest assured, Candy Crush is not Bejeweled. It's much harder, more challenging and nuanced. Those of you who have mastered Bejeweled will be in for a bad time. After the first few rounds, it's impossible to win just by matching candies of the same colour one at a time. Yet old habits die hard, and you may often find yourself simply matching coloured candies and getting frustrated at your lack of progress. At this point many people have concluded that the game is simply a money making exercise and that you can only win by paying money. However it's this difficulty the makes the game interesting and challenging, and many people (myself included) will tell you that it's perfectly possible to progress through the game without spending any money at all. In fact, this has been my self-imposed goal, and for this advanced strategy guide I will assume that it's your goal too.

Creating Combos

As you quickly learn, combining 4 or 5 candies in different arrangements creates special candies. I will not go into details since it has been covered so well in the following links:
Special Candies Guide
Special Candy Combos
Again, players of Bejeweled may think of these as "bonus combos". However this will just end in frustration. In higher levels is is mathematically impossible to win just by matching the same coloured candies. So it's best to think of these combos as "essential combos" instead. You can't win without them and need to create them wherever possible.

Once you know how to create special candies, it's important to recognise and memorise the arrangements of candies that will let you create a special candy on the next move. This is mentioned in the guides above. However for advanced play, it's useful to think about not just how to create special candies, but how to set up the creation of special candies. This way you increase your chances of winning.

For instance, if you see a horizontal line of two candies (e.g. blues) then a gap, then another 1 or 2 candies, try and keep that structure intact while you drop other candies through the gap. Eventually, a blue may fall into the right spot (or the spot above or below, requiring one further move). You will then have a striped candy or colour bomb. The same thing works vertically as well, in that you try and remove candy on either side so that the right colour candy will drop down into the spot either side of the gap. This is less likely to work than for a horizontal line.

Wrapped candies are harder to create like this, and rely more on luck. However you can look out for a structure that resembles an equal "L" or "T" with a gap, then try and drop candies until they make a match. Thankfully, wrapped candies tend to in general be less usefull than striped candies and colour bombs.

Potential Energy and Cascades

It may be useful to think of the "potential energy" of the board. That is, a board with high potential energy has a lot of matches ready to be made and any matches down low on the board may trigger a cascade of matches. Cascades are excellent because they conserve your moves and increase the chance of getting a special candy. If you have the choice of two moves, one of which will cause a cascade, choose that one.  

To maximise your chances of getting special candies and playing particular moves, you need the right amount of a particular colour in an area of the board. Too few and you won't be able to make any matches. Too many and they will likely be cleared in a cascade and ruin your plans. Keep this in mind when choosing which candies to clear.

Sometimes potential energy will get quite low and there will be few moves available. This often means you get stuck because the only moves available are fairly pointless moves. You will have to keep doing pointless moves until something better happens. Therefore to ensure the board is continually kept fresh and potential energy is kept high, bias your moves towards the bottom of the board. This is more likely to shake up the board than a move at the top of the board, and is more likely to cause cascades.

Also vertical matches shake up the board more than horizontal ones so are best for increasing potential energy. 

If your potential energy is getting very low, it may be best to try and trap yourself with no more moves possible. This will result in the board being shuffled, which is a whole lot better than wasting a lot of moves doing nothing. 

Luck

Like any game that isn't pure strategy,  success = luck + skill. You can't win without both. So don't get too frustrated when you lose over and over again - this is bound to happen. But by increasing your skill, you will get much further ahead than relying on luck alone.

Also like any casino game, the odds are stacked against you. Depending on how the candies fall, it's often impossible to win the level. There is however one advantage you get that isn't available in any casino games I know of. That is, the chance to walk away if you don't like your starting hand. By pressing the "back" key before you make your first move (on any level that isn't timed), you can go back to the level menu and reload the level with new initial positions. On certain levels (clearing chocolate or caged candy), this can mean the difference between winning and losing. If you are getting really stuck on a certain level, "re-rolling" it many times can help. Sometimes you will need to keep re-rolling until:

1. the ingredient starts in a decent place, not on the outer columns
2. you have an initial match set up to take out some chocolate, a caged candy or frosting.

Lives

The makers of the game want you to either wait 30 minutes for new lives, or pay $0.99. Well frankly, this bites, so I'm happy to use any method available to bypass this. Here's a trick that involves changing the time on your device that I can confirm works with Android phones.

1. Go to "Settings"
2. Go to "Date and Time"
3. Deselect "Automatic date and time"
4. Go to "Set date"
5. Increase the day by 1
6. Press "Set"
7. Press the notification from Candy Crush Saga
8. Press the level you are up to, but don't hit "Play"
9. Go back to Settings and select "Automatic date and time"
10. Go back to Candy Crush Saga.

It's best to follow these steps otherwise sometimes the game gets confused and thinks you have something like 1416 minutes (or more!) until you get a new life.

Objectives

Focus on your objectives. It's easy to get distracted matching candies. This is especially important in ingredient levels. These can be cleared easily with a few well-placed vertical striped candies.

Chocolate Tips

Chocolate only grows once per turn. This may seem obvious, but at first I thought it grew on a timer, meaning I rushed a lot of levels I shouldn't have. Try and take it out as quickly as possible, but also don't forget your objectives. It doesn't matter if chocolate takes over half the board if you get your ingredients down.

Chocolate also doesn't grow if you managed to destroy at least one piece that turn. But if you have a match near the chocolate that won't take out any chocolate, do something else and let the chocolate grow that turn. Then do the match when the chocolate is closer and take out some chocolate. Otherwise if you instead do the first match and clear no chocolate, the likelihood is that there is no match available immediately afterwards so the chocolate will grow on both turns.

Bomb Tips

Remember that if you only have 5 moves left, and you have bombs that will explode in 6 or more turns, you can effectively ignore them. Also if you have already reached the points target in a timed level, but are unable to clear a bomb, it's best to stop making moves and let your time run out. That way, the bomb won't explode and you will still pass the level.

Hierarchy of moves:

I've tried to boil all this down into a hierarchy of moves. It's not absolute (there will be exceptions in different situations), but it should be a decent guide on how to play a good strategy.

HIGH
1. Detonating important combos (e.g. massive combos that clear a lot of the board, detonating a vertical striped candy in the same column as an ingredient).
1. Destroying chocolate for good.
MEDIUM
2. Creating special candies.
2. Taking out bombs
2. Unlocking cages candies
2. Setting up future special candy moves (horizontal arrangement)
2. Setting up future special candy moves (vertical arrangement)
2. Taking out some chocolate

LOW

3. Matching candies that will create a cascade.
3. Matching candies down low to shake the board up
3. Matching candies higher up to clear a jelly in a tricky spot.
3. Matching candies higher up (vertically) because you have no other choices .
3. Matching candies higher up (horizontally) because you have no other choices.

Being a Quitter

Consider quitting the game if it looks like it's going nowhere. Remember that luck pays a large part in this game - even with perfect skill you often just can't win. Quitting will save you some time.

Conclusion

Follow these tips and you'll be on your way to becoming a Candy Crush Sage. Do you have any others that I could add to this guide? Please comment below.