Royal Match is a very well-made match-3 style game that lets you upgrade a king’s castle in the background. Earn stars by completing match-3 levels and make your king’s castle extravagant and beautiful!

Royal Match is a match-3 game that’s themed around a king rebuilding his castle. While the king and his castle occupy an important role in the game's background, they’re only that: the background. They provide a goal for you to aspire towards as you play the game: you earn stars whenever you beat a level of match-3. Earn enough stars, and you can unlock a new decoration or improvement for the king’s castle!

If you’re looking for a game about decision-making or long-term resource management, Royal Match isn’t it. Instead, the stars you spend go towards simple upgrades. There aren’t a lot of choices, only fairly linear unlocks that make your castle look cooler and cooler. Similarly, you don’t get to manage troops or attack other players. You’re limited to match-3 gameplay and not much else.

If you’re not familiar with match-3, the game starts off with a checkerboard-like pattern of different colored gems. Each turn, you swap the position of two adjacent gems. Afterward, if there are 3 or more gems of the same color next to each other, they’ll poof into glowy sparkles and disappear. The surrounding tiles will collapse inwards in order to fill the void left by your match, while new tiles will trickle in from the edges of the board to fill the remaining spaces. After things have settled, the game looks for new matches and repeats this process as many times as it needs to until no matches remain before letting you take another turn.

Royal Match is a bit more complicated than this. On each level, your goal will be slightly different. You’ll have to match tiles next to blocks to destroy them, for example, or slowly whittle down at pottery that surrounds big bombs. 

In a way, the match-3 gameplay serves as both a side objective and as the game’s puzzle mechanic. You’re not trying to get big matches as much as you are trying to match tiles in specific locations. This means that each turn can be filled with complex tactics. You might try to clear space so you can move tiles of the right color next to your objective, or you might try to make smaller matches with the tiles you have available now.

In addition to making simple matches, Royal Match allows you to build super blocks by matching patterns of 4 or more tiles. These bombs, rockets, and orb things allow you to explode huge swaths of the game board, clear an entire row, or even clear out a whole color with a single move. By looking for big clusters of 4 or more tiles, you can quickly clear the game board and achieve your objective.

Royal Match is a very well-made match-3 game. Like many other games in its genre, you’re limited in the number of levels you can play each day. Royal Match limits the number of moves you can make on each level. As the levels get harder, you’ll have to take breaks every so often to replenish your lives in order to make progress. You can spend money to play the game as much as you want, but you can also just play Royal Match in addition to other good match-3 games. This way, whenever you’re out of moves or lives, you can simply hop on over to your other favorite match-3 apps.

Royal Match is about patience, tactics, and thinking ahead. Early in the game, if you’re having trouble, be sure to look for the patterns you need to make your powerups. Carefully surveying the field for a bomb or rocket will give you powerful options that can make levels a lot easier. Once you’ve mastered recognizing these patterns, the next trick is to look ahead a little bit. Try to guess where each block will fall before you make a move and ensure that all of your moves put you in a good situation with easy follow-ups. 

Modern match-3 games are designed to be challenging. If you find yourself running out of moves and lives, don’t worry! It’s totally normal. The best thing to do in this situation is to get another match-3 app and play that while you’re waiting for Royal Match to regenerate. You’ll get lots of practice that you can use when Royal Match is available again.

Are you a Royal Match fan? Do you think it’s better or worse than Candy Crush Soda Saga? What other match-3 games do you play? Let us know in the comments below!