A typical bilging puzzle

Bilging is one of five duty puzzles and the first puzzle new players are assigned to practice. Its mechanics heavily borrow from Nintendo's Tetris Attack and Popcap's Bejeweled.

Good bilgers help to empty water that gradually gathers in a ship. The higher the bilge level, the slower the ship goes.

Basic Gameplay

The mouse or arrow keys move a two-piece target around the board. Clicking or pressing space swaps two selected pieces horizontally. Forming rows or columns of three pieces clears them and the bilge is pumped away.

Combos

This is an excellent bilge clear.

The best bilgers can create combos that clear more than three pieces. Clearing four or five pieces offers a slight bonus, but one should try to aim for clearing more than one column or row with one move. There are different messages for each combo:

Good - 4 in a row
Great - 5 in a row
Arrr! - 3x3 or 3x5
Har! - 4x4
Yarrr! - Ax5
Bingo! - AxBxC
Sea Donkey! - 3x3x3x3, 3x3x3x4, or 3x3x4x4
Vegas! - AxBxCx5

Chaining

It is possible to create chain reactions when bilging, but as chain reactions are often serendipitous, they usually do not add a great scoring bonus. On rare occassions, a long chain reaction will destroy many blocks and cause multiple crabs to raise above the waterline as well--these chain reactions can score noticably well. Perhaps the crab bonus is not reduced when it is part of a chain.

The Water Line

The water line across the base of the screen shows the bilger how much work he or she has left to do. Below the water line, pieces move more slowly. All bilge puzzles have at least three lines filled with water, even with no bilge damage.

Crabs, Puffer Fish, and Jellyfish, Oh My!

Crabs are immovable pieces that are cleared when they reach the water line. Crabs offer a high scoring bonus when cleared, and the bonus increases with the height of the water. Click on a crab only results in the crab doing a little jig while shrieking.

The puffer fish expands when clicked and clears itself and the eight adjacent pieces (Note: trying to swap two puffer fish will swap them like a normal pair of pieces). It is detrimental to your score unless it results in a chain reaction clear or it causes one or more crabs to clear by rising above the water line. (Destroying a crab by clicking an adjacent pufferfish does not score a bonus.) Letting pufferfish rise near the top of the screen can make converting crabs from obstacles into bonuses much easier--with one click on a pufferfish near the top of a board you can raise three columns by up to three spaces each.

Swapping a colored piece with a jellyfish clears all the pieces of the same color on the board. Attempting to swap the jellyfish with a crab does not work. Attempting to swap the jellyfish with the pufferfish will cause the pufferfish to activate first, destroying the jellyfish.

Bilge scoring

Bilge scoring comes from your efficiency to clear pieces. Unlike sailing, bilging also takes time delay directly into account. A delay of about ten seconds is acceptable when searching for a new move. A good balance of strategy and speed is best for a bilger.

Tips and Tricks

The best way to get a incredible the first league is to try to create a double on the first move. 75% of boards will all you to do this without having to move any other peices. You can also attempt to make a bingo in your first few moves.

As the size of the combo increases, the more moves you can make for it and have it still be an addition to your score. Strategy also changes greatly as you move up in levels (ranking). At the higher levels of bilge, you have more leeway to make extra moves to go for larger combos. At lower levels, you want to be even more efficient and generally aim for smaller combos.

Generally a break of 3 is worth slightly less than 1 move (and should mainly be used for intermediate breaks), while a break of 4 or 5 is worth between 1-2 moves. A 3x3 double is worth about 3 moves. At high levels, a bingo is worth about 8 moves. As you can see, as the size of the break goes up, the bonus you get increases quite a bit. If you can make the moves slowly in each time limit with consideration to each move then you can quickly reach a sparkly pump.

When the water level is high it is good to focus much more on crabs. You can often get an incredible simply by clearing crabs at max water level. You still have to keep move efficiency in mind, but you can, for example, do a 4 move 3x1 if it clears a crab at max water level.

Historical Notes

In release 2005-07-12, the bubbles and droplets were added. The overall animation speed also increased.

Beta release 2003-12-03 modified the bilge scoring to give much more weight to bingos and higher combos.

Before Beta release 2003-11-26, it was not necessary to bilge to keep a ship dry at 0% damage. With this release, all ships were made to take on bilge no matter the damage level if nobody was bilging.

In Beta release 2003-10-22, the bilge puzzle was modified to always have at least 3 rows of water, and always has at least 3 rows free of water.