Arkadium's Bubble Shooter

How to play Arkadium's Bubble Shooter

Coloured bubbles hang in a cluster at the top. A launcher sits at the bottom with your next bubble in it.

• Move the mouse to aim, then click to fire. On a phone, drag and release.
• A group of three or more touching bubbles of the same colour pops, so your bubble needs at least two of its own colour to land against.
• Any bubbles left hanging with nothing above them fall as well.
• Shots off the side walls rebound at the same angle, which is how you reach anything under an overhang.
• Push the cluster back through the levels and score as much as you can before the shots run out.

Lightning bubbles

These are the bonus pieces, and they clear far more than a normal shot does. A lightning bubble takes out large numbers of bubbles at once, cutting through a row rather than popping a small cluster.

They are not decoration. Landing one in the right place is worth several ordinary shots, and wasting one on a thin part of the board is one of the more expensive mistakes available.

The shot counter

Watch it. It is the only thing in the game you cannot recover, and it is easy to ignore while you are concentrating on the cluster.

Arkadium also lets you top it up by watching a short sponsor message after a few rounds, which adds moves without any purchase. Whether you use it is up to you, but knowing it exists is better than discovering it after the run is over.

Tips and strategy

Popping is cheap, dropping is not

There are two ways a bubble leaves the board and they cost the same one shot.

You can pop it, which removes exactly the group you matched. Or you can cut the connection holding a section to the ceiling, and everything hanging beneath it falls at once.

The second is worth several times the first, and almost every player spends their first hundred shots doing the first. Look up, find the bubbles actually touching the ceiling, and aim there.

Aiming

• Learn the rebound. The angle out equals the angle in, and once your hand knows it, half the board that looked unreachable opens up.
• Never fire a colour into a place where it has no neighbours of its own. That is how a board thickens into a wall you then have to dismantle.
• If you are handed a colour with nowhere useful to go, park it against the very edge rather than in the middle.

Making shots count

• Look at the next bubble before you fire the current one. Planning two shots instead of one is the biggest single improvement available to most players.
• Prefer the shot that breaks a support over the shot that clears the largest visible group.
• Finish a colour off entirely when you can. It stops appearing in the launcher, which makes every later shot more useful.
• Save lightning bubbles for the densest part of the cluster, or for a row that is holding up a large section.

When the count gets low

Stop building and start cashing in. With plenty of shots left it is worth spending one or two setting up a big drop. With five left it is not, because the setup will still be sitting there unfinished when the counter hits zero.

The last few shots should go to the largest guaranteed clear you can see, not the most elegant one you can imagine.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Firing at the nearest matching colour on reflex. It is the most common habit in the genre and it is almost always the worst available shot.
• Adding a bubble that pops nothing. Every one of those thickens the cluster you will need to dismantle later, and it costs a shot you cannot get back.
• Holding a lightning bubble so carefully that the run ends with it still in the launcher.
• Ignoring the queue. The next bubble is shown for a reason, and firing without looking at it turns a plan into a guess.

Other shooters here

Bubbles is the plain endless version if you would rather play against the ceiling than a shot counter. Microsoft Bubble is the polished middle ground, and Bubble Game 3 is level based with hand built boards. The rest sit in match 3.