Poker and Puzzles Together At Last

You would be hard pressed to find two game types that have captivated the masses so thoroughly over the years as match-three puzzle games and poker. The former can already be found in a wide variety on Xbox LIVE® Arcade, while the latter spans full-fledged Xbox 360® titles to Xbox LIVE Arcade games, television tournaments, your grandmother's monthly no-limit get together, and thousands of places beyond.

So many possibilities.

It's a wonder then that it is has taken so long to bring the two together, but the curious wait has paid off handsomely with Poker Smash™ for Xbox LIVE Arcade. This blend of both games is as wonderfully addictive as you might imagine, as you frantically scramble to score whopping poker hands while setting up classic match-three combos and multipliers for massive scores. It is as easily understood as it is hard to master. In short, it's the quintessential Xbox LIVE Arcade game.

Poker Smash for Xbox LIVE Arcade is a marriage
of two beloved game types and worthy of
celebrating as a triumph of game design.

Poker's Match-Three Foundation

For those unfamiliar with the match-three concept, your basic goal in Poker Smash is to match cards (at least three) to eliminate them from the board. The cards themselves will inch their way to the top of the screen, bringing the game to a close when the first card brushes against the dreaded red line at the top of the board.

Of course, with the poker theme, matching cards becomes a great deal more intricate and interesting as you look to set up not just threes of a kind but also straights, flushes, full houses, and straight flushes for more impressive payoffs. Taking the theme a bit further, Poker Smash acknowledges card combinations not possible in classic poker, including five and six of a kind and even up to nine-card flushes if you're particularly inventive.

While identifying and combining rare poker hands goes a long way toward establishing a high score, it's the multipliers that really send your point total skyrocketing to the stratosphere. These rare multipliers are achieved by setting up the board so that the cards above your first match fall just so to create a new, fully matched hand.

One three Jack multiplier coming up.

Feature Time

The stunning, slick, and intuitive menus of Poker Smash are just part of the overall package. Other highlight-worthy features include:

• Game modes: Beyond the standard Action Mode, you'll find quick, three-minute sprints to high scores in Timed Mode, a Puzzle Mode that asks you to find solutions for clearing each unique board, and a Practice Mode for sharpening your skills.
• Replay theater: Any round of Poker Smash you finish can be saved for posterity, viewable not only by you, but the public at large. Remarkable strings of multipliers and heady high scores deserve to live on well beyond a single play session.
• Poker Smash store: Every point you earn in-game is converted to currency for purchasing custom backdrops during play, Gamerpics for your profile, and even puzzle solutions to help you wrap your head around some of the tougher challenges.

The two bombs are looking good.

Of course, you'll also find a stack of achievements, Leaderboards, multiplayer matches offline and on Xbox LIVE, and a step-by-step tutorial as well, just to name a few of the standard options you can expect from nearly any Xbox LIVE Arcade game.

Essential Strategy

The basic gameplay may take only a moment or two to understand, but mastering its intricacies is a lifelong pursuit. Consider the following tips and you should be scoring multipliers and putting together complicated hands in no time.

• Multiplier priority: While larger hands like flushes, full houses, and straights earn decent points, it's the multiplier chains that really juice up the point total. Make multipliers your priority at all times.
• Fill the board: Don't be afraid to use the Left Trigger to speed up the board and fill the screen with cards, especially in the early stages of a game. Only with a relatively full board can you really begin to line up healthy combos for enormous scores.
• Bomb usage: Your stockpile of bombs replenishes rapidly as you put together hands and multipliers, so there's really no need to hold onto them in case of emergency. In fact, any time you use a bomb to match a hand, you'll receive an x2 multiplier. Place your cards correctly and you can use bombs to set off massive chains, both helping to clear up the board and rake in the points.
• Multiplier slowdown: Like bombs, your slow motion ability (Right Trigger) refills in a hurry as you score points. Slow things down after hitting your first multiplier so you can set up bigger chains precisely, without frantically trying to keep up with the pace of the game.
• Trigger twitching: Learning to use slow motion while simultaneously speeding up the number of cards on the board is perhaps the most important advanced technique to master. Start filling up the board with the Left Trigger while using the Right Trigger to keep the matched hands in a combo from disappearing too rapidly, and you can chain together massive multipliers for truly elite scores.

Poker Smash for Xbox LIVE Arcade is a marriage of two beloved game types and worthy of celebrating as a triumph of game design. Be sure to give this one a try for free by downloading the trial version from Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

Article by Ryan Treit