Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by imglorp 3983 days ago
Summing up digits manually takes too long. A decent strategy seems to be: start chaining a long path together. At some point it will pop by itself, or you will notice what's needed to complete it.

Suggestions: There should be a button to clear the chain in progress because you can box yourself into a dead end. A pause button would also be nice (maybe blank the screen when paused).

2 comments

Randomly chaining numbers seems to be the most practical strategy up until you start running into the empty blocks.

Game should probably be made a little easier so the intended strategy of chaining primes becomes more viable.

I found that the easiest consistent strategy is to play it like Minesweeper: start with randomly clicking (to gain time) until you find it too risky, then start with the easy portions (2-3 chains like 5-5 and 3-6-1 to clear out blockers, also remove 1s and 2s to increase overall average value), then move on to the difficult part when you're ready (chaining 40+ numbers when you have a lot of time).

There are of course other strategies, but I'll leave that for others to discover. :D

Even then, it's not hard to backtrack a block or two and keep your chain going. It's really not even a game at that point, I can just drag randomly and get crazy high scores.
I second the clear the chain in progress function as I ran into the same problem.