Ryukyu - Caravan Mode - 46,290 / 琉球 キャラバンモード
613th this week. Unfeasibly addictive game with lots of scoring elements. Like poker or solitaire it's fundamentally luck based but how you read the cards & the screen will still greatly impact the outcome. Just making a few random hands will never work & you need to weigh up the pros & cons of every single move you make
Each stage has a score limit you must reach & each hand has a set value. You can see 12 cards at all times but can only select from the bottom 4. When the grid is full, you've won or lost. It's impossible to use all cards in the deck, so holding out for a single card will likely lead to failure. There is also a single Wild card. If you place it in the centre it is at it's most useful & if you clear the stage, the next stage's Cards Left display will slightly highlight one column to tell you which one contains the wild card. No guarantee you can reach it though but it adds to the strategic thinking
The best thing you can do however is to place an identical card in each of the 4 corners. This is hard to do & ensures that those lines can no longer make straights or flushes but if you cleat the stage, every single hand made in the next screen is worth double. If you can make a hand in every single row & column in 1 screen (5 vertical, 5 horizontal, 2 diagonal), the next screen will highlight random lines.
Any hands made in these lines are worth double. Of course the 4 corners strategy is better as then all lines are doubled but that's much harder to do, & if you can complete the corners, that's 5 basic pairs already made at a minimum. Nowhere near enough score to clear the stage but with a wild in the middle, that's 6 lots of 3 of a kind at a bare minimum & you can try to up them to full houses whilst completing other 2-5 card hands on rows & columns 2 & 4
When you clear a stage, any score above the score limit gets factored into your clear bonus too. So if the score to beat is 6000 & you end the stage with 10,000 in total, the difference of 4000 is given to you again, along with the time bonus & 800 per each unused 'reversal'.
Also, a straight in worth more than a flush in this game unlike in real poker. It makes sense though as not all cards can be in play, so statistically it becomes harder to make a 5 card hand with sequential cards compared to a regular flush which does not require cards to be in a sequence, just of the same suit