If you’re tired of matching colored blocks, vegetables, candies, bubbles, and so on, King’s Pyramid Solitaire Saga (Free) can make for a nice change of pace, while still offering you many of the things you would expect from a game developed by the Candy Crush Saga (Free) giant. The most familiar thing it offers up is an often maddening level of difficulty. As I noted in my review, sometimes you can make all the right moves and still come up short thanks to the heavy luck element inherent to most solitaire games, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any merit to playing with strategy. While it’s hard to make much of an absolutely terrible draw of cards, there are plenty of cases where the difference between winning and losing rests on making effective moves. Having poured a fair bit of time into this game, I’ve once again put together a bunch of tips to help you along the way.
Plan the order of each move carefully. There are a few different goals in Pyramid Solitaire Saga, but no matter what you’re trying to do, using as few cards as possible will never work against you. Make sure you check all of the cards so that you can choose the biggest combo sequence possible. If you’re holding a four and you see a three, a two, an ace, two fives, two sixes, and a seven, if all other things are equal, you should go for the five-six-five-six-seven combo. Removing more cards with fewer draws is a big key to winning.
Pay attention to the background cards. Okay, so some of these tips are going to be very familiar to seasoned solitaire players, and this might be the big one. If you’re not used to video solitaire, it’s easy to let your eyes be caught by the highlighted cards at the top. They are important, of course, since they’re the cards you can pull, but equally important are the non-highlighted but still visible cards underneath. As you’re planning your combo, it’s valuable to think about what cards will be made accessible by the cards you pull. Doing so can help you clear out more cards and set up longer combos.
The key to a high score rests in combos. Of course, having cards left over, especially wild cards, will give a nice boost to your score, but if you really want to hit the three-star tier, you’re going to have to set up some long combos. If you have a choice between leaving a wild card on the board to be tallied up after finishing or using it to keep a good combo going, you should always use it. Similarly, as long as it doesn’t mess up your main goal, picking up non-essential cards to lengthen your combos is always a good idea.
Try to save a couple of wild cards until you’re nearly finished. They’re really your only defense against an unlucky draw. Most stages give you a couple of wild cards on the board, and you’ll always have one in your hand. Don’t be shy about using them if you need to, but that old idiom about keeping an ace in the hole hasn’t stuck around for nothing. Although it doesn’t really make a difference, it certainly feels better to fail earlier than to have one card left and not be able to remove it.
Make good use of your Blue Stash. The Blue Stash lets you keep a card to use later, but it’s important to remember how it works. You can put a card in there simply by tapping on the Stash, and take out by tapping on it again. Putting it in will shuffle you to your next card. Taking it out will replace the current top card, causing it to be lost to the discard. If your Stash is occupied, you can’t put another card in there without first removing the original card. If any cards are unknown, it’s always better to have something in the Stash than nothing at all, but if you can see what’s left on the board, don’t keep a useless card in there. You might want to save something useful and not be able to because you’ve got something wasting space in there.
Save your gold and power-ups. The game will give you some gold to start with, along with a few of each power-up as they unlock. You should keep the gold to unlock the gates at the end of each world. If you have no gold, you’ll have to wait or get a friend to help you out. As for the power-ups, use them at your discretion, but remember, you won’t be getting any more. Save them for levels where you really get stuck, and only use them when they will assure the victory. Wasting a power-up on a losing attempt just feels lousy.
Keep your goal at the heart of your strategy. When you’re matching cards and making combos, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to clear every card off the board, something you almost never actually need to do. If the mission is to clear the gold cards, focus on the cards you need to get out of the way. Spending a bunch of cards just to open up one wild card is generally not a good idea, and spending a bunch of cards just to earn a few more points is a terrible plan. If you need to remove a key block to get at a gold card, make sure you get to it as soon as possible. Remove vine cards over regular cards. The path to the goal is a straight line if you think about it carefully.
Take note of any extra stipulations beyond the main goal. You always need to earn a score of at least the one-star level. Some levels ask you to pull a blue card, make a sequence of a certain number, or a combination of the two. One of the trickier conditions asks you keep five cards left in your deck. It’s important to note that one, because you’re essentially out of cards when you have five left, but the game won’t remind you that you’ve lost until they’re all spent or you think you’ve cleared the stage.
Get sequences out of the way as soon as possible. As mentioned, many levels require you to remove a certain number of cards in a row without discarding. If you wait too long to do this, you’re not going to have enough cards left on the board to pull it off. The best thing to do is to unveil any wild cards on the board that you can, put a card in your Stash, and then go for it. Use up any wild cards to keep your combo going, and don’t forget that you can use your stashed card without losing your combo.
Squash those gold scarabs. Whenever you pull certain cards in a stage, usually the gold ones, a scarab will move across the screen. Make sure you tap it to get the extra points it offers. Some of them move pretty quickly and if you’re spacing out, you might miss out on some points that could make the difference between passing the stage and failing. Be ready whenever you pull a gold card.
Following this advice will help you out as you trek your way through Pyramid Solitaire Saga. The stage layouts may change, and the game might throw new obstacles or wrinkles at you, but the essential strategies are always the same. Find the straight line to success, and don’t get too discouraged when the game deals you an unwinnable situation. Even if you can’t win, you still get a chance to practice your strategies, which will help you win the next time. The key, as ever, is having patience and making careful moves.
