Chain Rxn on Facebook - scores and graphs

You will, by now, have become briefly addicted to ChainRxn, its a neat wee game on Facebook. My high Score is just over 25,000,000, after 30 or so games.

This is the highest score in my monkeysphere, but well below the highscores for all of Facebook, this stands at around 99,000,000.

The game is a bit of a chaotic system, this you know, you've got a rectangular playing field with coloured balls slowly bouncing diagonally around, these balls explode when they come into contact with an explosion, you have to place the first explosion. There are twelve levels each one with more balls the the last, and each one requiring a higher number of balls to be destroyed to proceed.

You can have as many attempts at each level as possible. Its an easy and relaxing game.

The levels increment as follows:-

Level 1 - Get 1 out of 5 balls
Level 2 - Get 2 out of 10 balls
Level 3 - Get 4 out of 15 balls
Level 4 - Get 6 out of 20 balls
Level 5 - Get 10 out of 25 balls
Level 6 - Get 15 out of 30 balls
Level 7 - Get 18 out of 35 balls
Level 8 - Get 22 out of 40 balls
Level 9 - Get 30 out of 45 balls
Level 10 - Get 37 out of 50 balls
Level 11 - Get 48 out of 55 balls
Level 12 - Get 54 out of 60 balls

You get points for each ball's explosion. The longer the chain reaction of explosions the more points for each ball. The points increment like this:-

So, what's the secret of getting a really high score?

Well, simply, its to keep playing.

I reckon the system is so chaotic, that its not worth figuring out the best time and place to put down your first explosion, just click randomly. You'll be fine.

For my first thirty or so games I kept a note of how many points I got for each level, so I can make up this neat wee graph:-

And this neat wee table:-

Level	Min	Max
1	100	3,600
2	200	44,100
3	400	56,600
4	2,700	627,400
5	11,700	542,000
6	33,600	1,838,000
7	79,400	6,876,400
8	116,900	5,833,300
9	207,200	6,739,400
10	485,100	5,756,500
11	543,700	18,432,100
12	1,183,100	9,604,400
Total	2,664,100	56,353,800

Those numbers at the bottom represent the highest and lowest possible scores I could get if I was lucky enough to get the lowest or highest score for each level.

In order to get a high score of 99,000,000, I reckon you have to just max out the scores for the last six levels. The first six levels are too small to get any decent chain reactions going, so its all about the last levels, and then its pretty much all about luck.

Sure, in theory you could get each ball to blow in order and get some score in the billions, but its not likely, and judging by the cluster of high scores around the 99,000,000 mark, its really unlikely. That number sounds like people getting 20 million for each of the last couple levels.

You gotta avoid 'clumping', and try to aim for long 'lines'. Don't aim that first explosion at clusters of balls cos you just lose a load of ball for 100 or 800 points each. Instead aim for empty spaces near the corners on just one ball's trajectory, sure it'll take a couple of attempts to complete the level, but it'll be a more highly scoring run. In the corners balls only come from one direction, so there's fewer balls, rather than in the middle where they come from all directions and 'clump' a lot more.

You gotta build up the chain reaction as efficiently as possible, losing as few balls as you can until the scoring for each explosion starts getting usefully into the tens and hundreds of thousands, aye.

If you only need to get 20 million to beat all your friends, then sure, play until the last level. If you want to top the high score table for all of Facebook, start again if you haven't got more than 20 million by Level 10.