Take It Easy iPhone & iPad Cheats And Tips
Clutching at straws? Take a look through our guide to this addictive puzzler.
Take It Easy is soaring up the App Store charts at the moment, and it's not hard to see why. The game's tile-switching, line-forming mechanics are incredibly addictive, and there are three distinct modes to sink your teeth into.
If you're struggling to get to grips with the basics, here's the complete lowdown on how to meet those scoring targets in short order.
- As a general rule of thumb, and if no tiles are locked, you should prioritize the placement of high scoring straw sections first. To play it safe, put these in the small vertical lines at the far right and left-hand sides of the grid. That allows you to play with the larger, remaining area of the grid while lowering the risk of disturbing this high score. As you master the game, increase the length of these high-score lines.
- In the Puzzle mode of the game, you "simply" need to swap tiles around to form continuous lines of a single color that run from one side of the grid to another. The trick here is that you can move tiles once they've been put into place - but if you disturb any scoring lines you've set up, those points will be deducted from your score.
- When it comes to filling in the rest of the grid, work your way inwards, and re-arrange the order of the high-scoring lines at the sides if necessary to form additional lines of play, without disturbing the original arrangement. This becomes more complicated once tiles starting getting locked out, but the principle remains useful.
- In the Classic version of the game, you aren't allowed to rearrange the shapes once they're placed, and you can't rotate them from the starting position in the pile either. Instead, you need to constantly weigh up the pros and cons of each placement and whittle down your highest potential score to a realistic one. Protect the 9s in the shortest lines, and leave the lowest scoring numbers in the longest line positions if you want to play it safe and sure.
- The Progressive mode of the game is unlocked once you've completed 25 levels of the Puzzle mode. Once you arrive in it, you'll need to achieve a certain score within a fixed time limit to proceed to the next round. Along the way you'll need to deal with fixed tiles, and limited placement opportunities.
- Every so often you'll be given the use of a special tile that won't break the lines of colors running through it in all directions. Keep this piece aside until you've solved as much of the puzzle as possible. Only put it into use to fill in a blank near the end of the solution - this helps narrow down its most useful placement.
