Grand Fruit Connect

Grand Fruit Connect stacks its pieces in layers and hands you a tray to work with. You collect matching tiles out of the pile, they leave when they meet, and the stack comes apart layer by layer as the pieces beneath become reachable. Directly alongside it sits Slidon.

The tray is the constraint the whole level turns on. Fill it with fruit you cannot match and there is nowhere to put the next tile, which is why GameBerry Studio’s instruction to plan your moves is literal rather than decorative. Boosters are on hand for the moment the tray gets crowded and the pile is still deep. Black and White 2 lays the same tiles out in another silhouette.

The art does real work too: faces are fruit rather than suits, and a melon reads as a melon at a glance where two counted symbols would need a second look. That shifts the whole difficulty onto tray management. Levels are discrete, the window is 800 by 600, and either a mouse or a fingertip picks tiles off the pile. The same discipline about buried tiles applies in the At Home – Xmas Edition board.

1. Tap a fruit tile on the top layer to collect it into the tray.
2. Send matching fruit to the tray together so they clear instead of piling up.
3. Take the top layer down before digging at partly covered tiles.
4. Spend a booster when the tray is filling and the pile has not thinned.
5. Clear the stack to finish the level.

• Count the copies — collecting one lonely fruit into the tray is only sensible if you can see where its partners are.
• Keep two slots spare — a full tray ends the level, so treat the last couple of places as reserve rather than storage.
• Peel the top layer flat — half-covered fruit is hard to identify and easy to collect by mistake.
• Save boosters for the base — the bottom layer of a Grand Fruit Connect pile is where the awkward leftovers gather.