Strategy Guide

1. The Reaction Table

Every merge in Alchemy Blocks is determined by which two elements collide, not just whether they match. Memorising this table is the foundation of everything else.

Element A	Element B	Result	Type
Earth	Earth	Stone	Evolution
Fire	Fire	Magma	Evolution
Stone	Magma	Metal	Evolution
Metal	Metal	Gold	Evolution
Gold	Gold	Philosopher's Stone	Victory
Fire	Water	♨ Steam — clears row or column (swipe axis)	Utility
Water	Water	Ice — frozen 5 turns	Hazard

Tiles that don't have a compatible reaction simply block each other — they stop when they touch and neither merges. Two Stone tiles, for example, don't react. Keep this in mind when planning swipe directions: an unproductive collision wastes both the move and the space.

2. How the Stability Meter Works

The Stability Meter reads the situation on your board — not just a count of dangerous tiles. It weighs four things together: how much open space you have, whether tiles can react with their neighbours, whether a Fire + Water steam escape is available, and how much pressure the high-tier tiles add. If it reaches zero the experiment ends — but that's reserved for genuinely hopeless boards.

The biggest factor is space. Empty cells are escape valves, so a roomy board reads calm regardless of what's on it. A board crowded with high-tier tiles and no room to manoeuvre reads dangerous.

The second factor is resolvability. A dangerous tile sitting next to a partner it can merge with is largely defused — its stress is discounted heavily because you can clear it on your next move. The same Gold tile is calming when it's beside another Gold, and alarming when it's stranded alone.

Each tile type also carries its own base level of stress, which only bites at full weight when the tile is trapped with no merge partner. From calmest to most volatile:

• Earth, Water, Fire (base elements): none
• Ice (while frozen): low
• Stone: moderate
• Magma: moderate–high
• Metal: high
• Gold: very high
• Philosopher's Stone: extreme

A Fire next to Water is read as a positive signal: it's a steam escape you can fire at will to clear a whole row or column, so it lifts the meter even on a tense board. Actually triggering Steam gives an additional boost on that turn.

The practical implication: don't panic at the raw number of high-tier tiles — panic when they get isolated on a crowded board. Keep your dangerous tiles paired up with merge partners and keep open space available, and the lab stays calm even deep into a run.

3. Reaching the Philosopher's Stone

The pinnacle of the reaction chain is the Philosopher's Stone — two Gold tiles merged together. In Classic and Daily Challenge that's an outright win; in Infinite mode there is no win screen, but it's still the top tile and the natural target for a high-scoring run. The chain to get there is: base elements → Stone / Magma → Metal → Gold → Philosopher's Stone. Every step doubles the number of source tiles required, so the real bottleneck is board space, not tile count.

The path from scratch looks like this in terms of source tiles:

• Stone requires 2 Earth tiles.
• Magma requires 2 Fire tiles.
• Metal requires 1 Stone + 1 Magma = 4 base tiles.
• Gold requires 2 Metal = 8 base tiles.
• Philosopher's Stone requires 2 Gold = 16 base tiles, all consumed in sequence.

Those 16 source tiles don't all exist simultaneously — you merge them as they appear — but the board has only 16 cells. Any Ice tile or unproductive blocking tile is effectively a dead cell eating into your working space.

In Classic and Daily Challenge there's a second clock: a 100-move budget. You don't just need to reach the Philosopher's Stone — you need to reach it before the budget runs out, and every move you save becomes score (see Scoring). That makes wasted, non-merging swipes genuinely costly, and turns Steam reactions and tight chain-merges from nice-to-haves into the core of an efficient run.

4. Advanced Board Control

The Corner Anchor

Your most advanced tile should always be anchored in one corner. Choose a corner — bottom-left is conventional — and never swipe in the direction that would move that tile away from it. If your Gold is in the bottom-left, "swipe up" becomes a last resort only. Every other swipe keeps the Gold pinned.

The reason: high-value tiles that drift to the centre become impossible to protect. A central Gold can be cut off from potential merge partners by a single blocking tile on any side, and the only way to clear the blocker may require a swipe that moves the Gold further into danger.

Managing Ice Tiles

Ice tiles (Water + Water) are frozen for five turns and count as obstacles. They can't be merged and they contribute hazard cost (2 per tile). On a nearly full board even one Ice tile can be the difference between a viable game and a dead end.

Never intentionally merge two Water tiles unless the board is spacious and you're desperate for a merge. If Ice appears, count your turns — it thaws after five of your moves and becomes a regular Water tile again, which you can then use productively in a Steam reaction.

Tactical Steam Clearing

A Steam reaction (Fire + Water) clears every tile in the row or column the merge happens on — the row when you swipe horizontally, the column when you swipe vertically. That's up to 4 tiles removed in a single move. This is the most powerful tool in the game, but it has a cost: you're consuming a Fire and a Water tile that could have continued their own merge chains.

The best time to trigger Steam is immediately before a critical merge — particularly when you have two Gold tiles and one blocking tile stands between them. Clear the blocker with Steam, then complete the Gold merge on the next move. Using Steam speculatively, just to reduce hazard, is usually a waste.

5. The Daily Challenge

The Daily Challenge uses a deterministic seed based on the date, so every player who plays a given day's puzzle receives the same sequence of tile spawns in the same positions. A fresh puzzle is available each calendar day.

Because the sequence is fixed, Daily Challenge scores are directly comparable — a lower move count is always better. The optimal strategy shifts slightly from Infinite Mode: since you know (eventually) which tiles are coming, the goal is to set up chain merges that consume multiple tiles in as few swipes as possible rather than playing reactively.

A few Daily Challenge-specific tips:

• Resist the urge to merge on the first few moves. Let the board develop and identify which element type is spawning most frequently before committing to a corner strategy.
• Steam reactions are especially valuable here because they compress a lot of board state into a single move, keeping your move count low.
• The Daily Challenge runs in Classic mode, so reaching the Philosopher's Stone wins the run. The stability rules are the same as Infinite — but don't ignore the meter.

6. The Void Blast

The Void Blast lets you remove any single tile from the board after watching a short rewarded ad. It's available via the footer icon whenever you have more than one tile on the board. The Void Blast is most valuable when a single tile — typically an Ice block or a stranded Stone — is physically separating two identical high-value tiles that would otherwise merge.

In Daily Challenge mode you are limited to 2 Void Blasts per run. The remaining count shows as a badge on the button and is preserved if you close and reopen the tab. In Infinite and Classic modes there is no limit.

Don't use it as general board maintenance. Save it for the moment when removing one specific tile would unlock a Gold merge or prevent an imminent stability collapse. Used at the right moment it can recover a run that looks completely lost.

7. Scoring & the Move Budget

Points are awarded for every successful merge, and higher-tier reactions score more (a Philosopher's Stone is worth far more than a Stone). A Steam reaction is worth a fixed bonus regardless of how many tiles it clears. This running total is your Alchemy Score.

In Classic and Daily Challenge, that's only half the story. Each run starts with a budget of 100 moves, and every move you make counts down toward zero. Reaching the Philosopher's Stone with moves to spare earns a Speed Bonus worth 100 points for every move you didn't use:

• Total Score = Alchemy Score + Speed Bonus, where Speed Bonus = (remaining moves × 100).
• If the budget hits zero before you forge the Philosopher's Stone, the run is lost ("Out of Moves") and no high score is recorded — regardless of how high the alchemy total climbed.
• A high score is banked only on a win, so the leaderboard rewards players who actually complete the transmutation, and rewards them more for doing it efficiently.

Infinite Mode has no move budget: there your score is simply the alchemy total, and your best run is saved at any time. Scores are tracked separately for each mode — Infinite, Classic, and Daily each maintain their own high score.

For a deeper walkthrough of the controls and interface, see the How to Play page.