Puzzle & Dragons: Top five tips, tricks and cheats for dungeon dominance

Puzzle & Dragons is a massively popular game out of Japan that continues to be among the top free-to-play titles in the App Store. True to its Japanese roots, you’re going to find a lot of Pokemon-style creatures and statistics here, but at its core is a match-3 game along the same vein as Candy Crush Saga.

The gameplay is decidedly more deep, with massive creature selection, progression and upgrading. This depth may pose some serious challenges to players trying out the game for the first time, but we've got some tips to help you get started and clearing out dungeons in no time.

1. Restart the tutorial until you get a high-quality god

Puzzle and Dragons tips

When first starting out, you’ll be shown the ropes through a tutorial level and eventually get to buy your first god. The quality of that hero will be rated in stars, and will be doing a lot of heavy lifting for your team. To maximize how well you do out of the gate and in the long term, you want to make sure that it’s a really great [ocl. If it isn’t, uninstall the game, reinstall, and run through the tutorial again. It’s a bit of a hassle, but will ensure you do well in the long haul. There are plenty of opinions on which gods are ideal for your “starting pull”. If you’re willing to put the time in, keep going until you get Horus, Isis, Archangel Lucifer, Bastet, Kushinada, or Umisachi and Yamasachi.

2. Make more than one match at a time

Puzzle and Dragons hints

Though Puzzle & Dragons is technically a match-3 game, it’s much more free-form than most, since you can move tokens anywhere on the board. That said, make sure you make more than a single match with every move to get your best bang for buck. This is done by keeping an eye on how tiles are swapped as you move yours; ensure the one you’re moving will be replaced by something that will make a match at the original location. With any luck, swaps you make on your path to the final spot will create more matches. Basically, you should be doing a combo every turn.

3. Log in regularly for rewards

Puzzle and Dragons tips

You can easily stock up on magic stones simply by logging in regularly. Players earn rewards for logging in for consecutive and cumulative days. On your seventh consecutive log-in you’ll get 500 coins and 200 PAL points, and smaller rewards every day leading up to that. If you manage to log in 500 days total, you’ll get 15,000 coins, 1400 PAL points, and 83 magic stones all-told.

4. Save magic stones for GodFest

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Though you may be eager to pop your magic stones into the rare egg machine for a new god as soon as possible, sit tight until a God Fest is happening. Odds of getting a really great egg increase a bunch during these events, which usually happen on weekends. Even though you’ll be raking in the stones early on, don’t spend them frivolously on stuff like endurance or retrying dungeons.

5. Get friendly

Puzzle and Dragons tricks

Identify high-level helpers that fit in with the elemental theme of your team and friend them. Stock up on friends, since you can only call on their help if they’ve logged in recently, and keep your friends list pruned of folks that haven’t been online in awhile. You'll also get PAL points whenever they use your hero, which can be spent on getting a few new monsters.

Your Puzzle & Dragons hints, tips, tricks, and cheats?

That really just scratches the surface of Puzzle & Dragons. It's a much deeper game than it lets on at first, but these hints should help you get on your way. Any experienced PAD players care to lend their advice in the comments?

Simon Sage

Editor-at-very-large at Mobile Nations, gamer, giant.