Solving Simplified Candy Crush, i.e., Match-3 Games with Swaps

Welcome back! In this fourth post of my series on solving Match-3 games with graph algorithms, we will be continuing to add more features to our Match-3 games. In my previous post, we described the Swapless Match-3 with Gravity (SM3G) game, where the goal was to find contiguous lines of the same color, and blocks would “fall down” into empty spaces.

In this post, we will be adding swaps to the game! The Match-3 game will continue to have gravity, so blocks fall down as the player removes some of them. The key difference is…