Getting Three Stars on Every Level

Every level you clear is rated out of three stars based on how few moves you needed. Each level has a par move count — roughly what a clean run takes, with cascades and bigger matches included. Finish at or under par and you get three stars. Up to one and a half times par gets you two. Anything longer gets you one.

Par scales with the level. A late level on Steel City has a much higher par than the first level of Lock & Load, because the enemy has more health and the fight genuinely takes longer. Par is not a fixed number of moves; it is the number of moves the level is designed to take if you play it well.

Twenty-four stars is a perfect map. A hundred and twenty is a perfect campaign.

The most common mistake is treating par as a challenge to play faster. It is not. You can take as long as you like between moves — the clock is not the constraint. What costs you stars is making swaps that do not do enough.

Every move you spend on a three-match that drops nothing useful into place is a move you did not spend on a cascade. On an early level you can afford a dozen of those. On a boss level you cannot afford three.

So the discipline is the same one that makes cascades work: take the swap that leads somewhere, not the swap that is available. If you cannot see one, spend a moment looking at columns instead of rows. There is almost always a better move than the first one you noticed.

First: hold your striped tiles. A striped tile is worth far more fired into an existing chain than fired alone, and most players spend them the moment they get them. Wait until you have a match you can drop it into.

Second: do not use a booster for stars. Boosters make levels easier; they do not make them shorter. A Repair Kit that keeps you alive through a scrappy forty-move win does not get you three stars — it gets you one, comfortably. Stars come from the board.

Third: replay. Nothing stops you going back to a level you have already cleared and trying it again for a better rating, and your best rating is the one that sticks. If you scraped through a level on two stars, come back to it later with a rank or two more behind you and take it apart properly.

Stars are worth coins, so a tidy win pays better than a scrappy one — and that matters more than it sounds, because the coins are what fund the boosters you will want for the commanders.

The practical loop is: clear a map for progress, then go back and clean it up for stars, then spend those coins on boosters before the next commander. It is a much better use of an evening than repeatedly losing a run three levels into the next map.