Forget Candy Crush - Play Chip Chain Instead

Forget Candy Crush. Forget Angry Birds. Forget Clash of Clans. If you want an addicting mobile game, there’s one that blows the others out of the water, and it’s called Chip Chain. It’s available on iOS and Android, so you can play it on your device of choice. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t, but if you aren’t playing this game then you’re definitely missing out. Seriously, why aren’t you playing it?

Does that sound like high praise? It is, especially considering the fact that I don’t generally sink too many hours into mobile games. I’ve played a lot of them, of course, but none has really kept me engaged like Chip Chain. Keep reading to find out this game is so great.

First Impressions

“Match three” games have been done to death on the mobile platform. You have a board filled with different pieces and you need to match three of them in a row to remove them from the board. It’s a simple mechanic and for a while I was starting to think that the genre had been fully explored. It hasn’t.

Chip Chain is an evolution of the match three concept and the strategic depth in this game is different from most games of the sort. But more than that, Chip Chain just feels like a quality game. The graphics, the animations, the audio and the feel are top notch. As a fan of poker, the casino theme makes me feel right at home.

When it comes to casual match three mobile games, I have to say that Chip Chain is my favorite of all time. It’s the perfect combination of strategy, eye candy, and gratifying gameplay and it’s all available for FREE.

Core Gameplay

The premise of Chip Chain is easy to grasp: there’s an empty grid (the board) that can be occupied by casino chips. Each chip has a numeric value and the goal is to clear them out when there are three or more of the same value chips adjacent to each other.

On each turn, you get to place a random chip on the board. At the bottom of the screen is a queue of upcoming chips so you can plan ahead how you’re going to place them. When you place a chip down, the AI also places a chip (not necessarily the same value) on the board.

On each turn, you can also clear out as many chip groups as are on the board. When a group of chips is cleared out, it turns into a single chip of the next numeric value. Furthermore, this ones placement on the board depends on which chip in the group you decided to tap. For example, I could tap three 5 chips that are in a row and a 6 would appear in its place where I tapped it.

This is how you combo. If there is a group of 3 chips next to a group of 4, converting the 3 into a 4 chip allows you to continue clearing chips, which is called “chaining.” Clearing the board is important since it gives you more space to place your chips down.

Lastly, there are cards. You can gain these by chaining chip groups OR you can buy them using the in-game currency of gems (more on that later). Cards allow you to make special actions, like increasing or decreasing the value of chips.

Other Features

There are four game modes in Chip Chain:

• Short: The game ends when 40 chips are placed down. Maximize your points and make sure each action counts.
• Long: You can place an unlimited number of chips. The game ends when the board fills up, and no more actions are possible.
• Timed: You have two minutes to rack up as many points as possible.
• Daily: Compete against others to see how many points you can rack up on a specific starting board. There’s a new starting board every day.

Every day, two of the four game modes are locked unless you buy them all using gems in the store (more on that below). But frankly, all of the game modes are so fun that it doesn’t really matter unless you really wanted to play the Daily mode against others.

As you play the game, you earn experience and gems. Gems are the in-game currency used to unlock extra features in the store. As you earn experience, you gain levels, and when you gain one, you earn bonus gems. You can unlock everything just by playing the game.

But for those of you who want to buy gems, you can. At the time of writing, gems were $2 for 100k, $5 for 500k, or $10 for unlimited gems. Not bad at all considering how much of a money drain other mobile games can be.

Conclusion

I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this game until recently. It’s got everything you could ever want in a casual mobile game: beautiful graphics, lots of fun and addicting gameplay, all available at an incredibly reasonable price. It definitely rivals many of the best Android games out there.

Download: Android (Free), iOS (Free)