Candy Mahjong

Agame dressed a tile-matching board in confectionery: the faces on a Candy Mahjong layout are sweets and cookies rather than bamboo, dots and characters, and the colour coding does most of the work of telling one from another. The tower-tips guide walks through the same rules from the start.

The build leans on plain controls — point, click the first sweet, click its twin, and the pair goes. Boards of this kind usually release only a tile whose top is clear and whose left or right edge is open, so the pile comes apart from the outside in. What the game adds on top of that is quantity: an assortment of levels that grows more demanding the further along it you get. Another board from the same undemanding group is the Kids pile.

The frame is 800 by 600, squarer than most, which suits a compact pile of brightly wrapped sweets, and the build accepts touch input as readily as a mouse. Another layout to unstack is Kitchen.

1. Pick out two identical sweets or cookies somewhere on the layout.
2. Check that each one is uncovered and open along a side.
3. Click the sweet and then its twin, and the two confections leave the pile together.
4. Clear the topmost pieces first to expose the colours underneath.
5. Empty the layout to move on to the next of Candy Mahjong's levels.

• Sort by colour first — the Candy Mahjong art separates its sweets by palette faster than by shape.
• Take the top pieces — anything removed up there turns two or three buried confections into legal moves.
• Work the free edges — a matching pair pinned on both flanks is not a move, however obvious it looks.
• Expect the assortment to bite — it starts gently and the later layouts are stacked considerably thicker.