Feed the Animals

Feed the Animals borrows the connect board and changes what counts as a pair. Tiles do not match by being identical — an animal is matched with the food it eats, so a rabbit looks for a carrot rather than for another rabbit. The eater-and-food idea takes a minute to settle into and then makes every scan of the field faster. Another entry from the same shelf is Xmas Mahjong.

The linking rule is standard and unforgiving. A path is drawn between the two tiles and it may turn no more than twice at right angles; if a standing tile sits anywhere along that route, the pair does not clear. Two tiles a hand’s width apart are frequently illegal while two on opposite edges connect cleanly around the outside. The same group of boards includes Disney Princess Mahjong.

A time limit runs while you work, so the reading has to be quick as well as correct, and the whole field must be paired away to win. The HTML5 build works on phones, laptops and desktop machines, and full screen is worth switching on before the clock starts, because the food tiles are drawn small and a pear and an apple are one glance apart. The Christmas board sits one row away in the same list.

1. Find an animal tile and the food that belongs to it.
2. Trace the route between them: it may bend at most twice, and no standing tile may block it.
3. Select both tiles to send the pair off the field.
4. Match every animal with its meal before the time limit expires.

• Learn the menu first — a wrong pairing in Feed the Animals usually means the wrong diet, not the wrong route.
• Work the outer ring, where a path can swing round the edge of the field inside the two-turn limit.
• Break dense blocks early — tiles locked in the centre have no legal route out until the rows around them thin.
• Keep an eye on the clock — reading an animal against its food takes longer than spotting twins, and the timer makes no allowance for that.