Merge Mansion is not your typical merge game. In fact, Merge Mansion isn’t your run of the mill match-3 game, either. Despite offering elements of both genres, Merge Mansion manages to be its own thing, with its unique offering of elements that, while resembling similar games, still manages to be its own thing.
However, as it’s usually the case whenever a game tries to do something innovative, it might be a bit difficult to get started in Merge Mansion, since you won’t know exactly what to do. Fortunately, this has a decent tutorial that can help to get you acquainted with the basic mechanics. Additionally, you can also get access to the best gameplay experience by playing Merge Mansion on PC with BlueStacks. Nevertheless, if you want some useful tips and tricks to help you get started, then this beginner’s guide is definitely for you.
Everything Can be Merged
As the title of this entry implies, one of the most important concepts of this game is that anything and everything that’s on the board can be merged. In fact, one of the first things you’ll be doing is dragging items and dropping them on other similar objects to create new ones. This is the basic gameplay loop of Merge Mansion, and it’s the main form in which you will be obtaining new items to progress through the story.
After you complete the tutorial and advance to another room, you can start by combining elements on the board and determine what items you can get. Keep in mind, however, that the objective of Merge Mansion is not to clear the board nor combine everything at once; there’s actually a story with objectives that you must progressively complete.
This brings us to our next point.
Progressing Through the Story
In contrast with other match-3 or merge games, where the gameplay takes place in a variety of levels, Merge Mansion follows a single storyline with our heroine working to explore the estate. However, years of neglect have made the place fall into disrepair, and all its spaces are ruined and filled with clutter and debris. In this sense, to clear a path, we must merge objects on the board not only to clean up the room, but also to create elements and tools that can help in the cleaning process.
Every object that you merge will turn into a new one of a higher level. And once an object reaches a specific level, they can be used as tools to advance the story. For instance, if we need a pair of usable gardening gloves, we can combine two regular Gardening Gloves (Lvl. 1) to create a pair of Gardening Gloves (Lvl. 2), and then combine these with another pair to create a brand new Gardening Gloves (Lvl. 3), which can then be used to progress the story in certain areas.
And just like with the Gardening Gloves, there are countless other objects that you will need to combine and create as you progress through the story in Merge Mansion. But don’t worry too much about creating objects ahead of time, as you will always get an indication of when you need them when you actually get to their respective points in the plot. Moreover, you can also click on an object to learn about its upgrade path.
Also, as a general rule of thumb, you can know which items could eventually be used since they usually look brand new and colorful. In contrast, lower level items always look basic, or old and weathered. In other words, if an object is shiny and stands out, it will probably be used at some point, so keep them around.
Creating Source Items
While the boards in Merge Mansion often have items that can be easily combined, there will be some that are blocked by some elements of the room, like cobwebs and dust, and therefore can’t be dragged or moved in any way. In these cases, you will need to drag and drop clean pieces to these blocked tiles in order to clean and merge them, freeing up the slot and also creating a new object in the process. In some cases, however, the object you need might not be obtainable with the current selection of items at your disposal, in which case you’d need to create what we call a “source item”.
Source items are objects that, when clicked, can dispense a variety of random items on the board, which can then be combined into other creations. These source items are important since they will let you clear blocked slots in those times when you don’t have any valid combinations on hand. In this sense, it should be your utmost priority to create a source item as soon as you get to a new room.
One good tip to keep in mind here is that, to identify source items, you only need to look for the objects that look like boxes or containers. Once you’ve found them, you’ll need to merge them at lower levels until they achieve a form that’s able to dispense items, which is often at level 4 or above.
Playing Through the Main Story
Most of the time, you will need to create a specific item to advance in the story. However, on occasions, some of the story missions will actually reward you with items that you could use to continue advancing through its missions. This is always a handy thing to keep in mind, especially since your source items are not endless and have a cooldown after dispensing a set number of items.
By working through the story, you can essentially keep up the influx of items and continue creating new combinations. This will be an invaluable tip for later stages that require high level items, so you can shorten the time required by slightly reducing your reliance on source items.
Level Up to Unlock Boosters
In Merge Mansion, you can level up your account to receive awesome bonuses, including useful boosters that can give you a leg up on the tougher missions. However, leveling up is slow in this game, as you only receive experience by completing story missions, or by combining items to level 5, which will spawn a small blue star. If you click on this star, you will instantly receive a small amount of experience. However, just like everything else in Merge Mansion, these stars can also be combined.
By combining experiences stars, you can significantly increase the amount of experience gained from consuming them regularly. And the more you combine, the more experience you’ll get. In this sense, always try to get your stars as high as possible before actually consuming them.
With these basic tips, you should have everything you need to get started in Merge Mansion. As a final bonus pointer, we recommend just getting out there and start combining and experimenting; the worst that could happen is that you combine an item that you would need for a mission, in which case you’d need to combine it again at that point. Nevertheless, by merging everything, you’ll also gain tons of experience stars and boosters. Practice makes perfect!
