No moves possible

OzarkBoatswain

Is it possible to get the game into a state where neither side can make any moves? I was thinking if you bubbled up the entire board with IW and didn't have the green to pop them, it might happen. But is it actually possible to do this?

zeeke

Yes and then the board shuffles

CT1888

But if they were all locked, and since the board never reshuffles into a match, would it be stuck in a permanent loop of shuffling?

In theory, sure it could be done, but would take a heck of a lot to get everything locked though...

jvasses

good, thought, but would be incredibly hard to do

notamutant

Just because you lock tiles doesn't mean they won't shuffle when whole board reshuffles.

Cypr3ss

notamutant wrote:

Just because you lock tiles doesn't mean they won't shuffle when whole board reshuffles.

That's true, but in theory, if enough tiles on the board are locked, even after a reshuffle you wouldn't be able to move anything to make a match, which would be.... interesting.

Makes me wonder if there's a limit to the number of locked tiles you can have out.

Regards,
Cypr3ss.

morph3us

We tried this when they first released survival mode about a year ago, with IW. No one, as far as I know, ever managed to lock the board down entirely, but there were some pretty impressive attempts.

Edit: Found the thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=20971

JamieMadrox

CT1888 wrote:

... and since the board never reshuffles into a match ...

I'm pretty sure the board reshuffle is completely random and can result in matches.

I could be wrong though.

simonsez

Jamie Madrox wrote:

show previous quotes

CT1888 wrote:

... and since the board never reshuffles into a match ...

I'm pretty sure the board reshuffle is completely random and can result in matches.

I could be wrong though.

I've never seen that happen, and I've never seen threads complaining "The AI shuffle always results in big cascades, but mine never do".

Dayv

simonsez wrote:

show previous quotes

Jamie Madrox wrote:

I'm pretty sure the board reshuffle is completely random and can result in matches.

I could be wrong though.

I've never seen that happen, and I've never seen threads complaining "The AI shuffle always results in big cascades, but mine never do".

Agreed. It seems to do a test of the new board layout to make sure it makes no immediate matches but has matches available. I expect that if you did lock the board up completely (which may be functionally impossible with the current locking powers), this background check would retest combinations infinitely, causing the game to freeze up trying to complete this step. It's possible they put some sort of secondary behavior in place to resolve this edge case, but I'd be surprised.

Dayv

DayvBang wrote:

show previous quotes

simonsez wrote:

Jamie Madrox wrote:

I'm pretty sure the board reshuffle is completely random and can result in matches.

I could be wrong though.

I've never seen that happen, and I've never seen threads complaining "The AI shuffle always results in big cascades, but mine never do".

Agreed, I've also never seen a board shuffle create immediate matches. It seems to do a test of the new board layout to make sure it makes no immediate matches but has matches available. I expect that if you did lock the board up completely (which may be functionally impossible with the current locking powers), this background check would retest combinations infinitely, causing the game to freeze up trying to complete this step. It's possible they put some sort of secondary behavior in place to resolve this edge case, but I'd be surprised.

Unknown

The board never shuffles into something with an immediate match, though of course it is quite possible to have huge cascading matches after you make a move on a reshuffled board.

You have to lock at least 61 out of the 64 tiles, otherwise after enough reshuffles you'll end up with something that looks like:




Which is a valid move. If all but 3 (or less) tiles are locked, it isn't possible to move anything into a match 3. Note that in the above case the lock will eventually be broken if the 4th tile on the second row is also a yellow, even if it's locked, though in this scenario you can accumulate more AP to try to lock again. It'd likely take an astronomical number of shuffles to get the board into this position if the shuffle process is truly random.

Unknown

It could look like this with only 43 of 64 locked and not have a possible match as long as any bubble directly above, below, left, or right of another bubble are not the same color.

Unknown

McDongles wrote:

It could look like this with only 43 of 64 locked and not have a possible match as long as any bubble directly above, below, left, or right of another bubble are not the same color.

Pretty sure the position of the bubbles themselves are reshuffled when no moves are available, which is why nobody has successfully stalled the game yet since shuffled bubbles generally leaves you with no choice on what moves to make.

Kolence

I believe all it takes are two non bubbled tiles, and the board will reshuffle into a state where those are adjacent and at least one of those two tiles, when swapped, will make a match with the surrounding bubbled tiles. And it would take just one reshuffle; I don't recall ever needing more than one reshuffle to again have a possible move. Even with 2/3 or more of the board bubbled (with the old IW in EotS wave nodes).

Something like this:










Now, if the non bubbled tiles also happened to be in colors that had no more than two tiles on the whole board...