How to play Candy Orchard
Candy Orchard is a bubble shooter. A swarm of coloured sweets hangs from the top of the screen, you fire from the bottom, and three of a colour that touch each other disappear. That is the whole rule. Everything below is about the part that actually decides whether you clear the basket.
The rules
- Aim and fire. On a phone, hold your finger down to aim and lift it to shoot — the aim point sits above your finger so it never covers the landing zone, and dragging back down past the shooter cancels the shot. On a desktop the aim follows the mouse and a click fires; the arrow keys nudge the angle and space fires.
- Three or more of the same colour, touching, pop. The sweet you fire counts towards the group.
- Anything left hanging falls. Sweets stay on the board only while they are connected to the ceiling. Cut the connection and the whole clump drops — and everything that drops counts.
- Miss too often and the ceiling comes down. Shots that pop nothing build up, and after enough of them a fresh row is pushed in from the top.
- Clear the basket to win it. Let the swarm reach the bottom and the basket spills; you can start it again for free, every time.
The thing that separates a good shot from a lucky one
Popping three sweets removes three sweets. Cutting a cluster loose can remove twenty. The board hangs from the ceiling, so the sweets worth aiming at are almost never the big obvious blob in the middle — they are the two or three sweets holding a whole limb of the swarm up. Look for a narrow neck where a large section joins the rest, break it, and watch the entire section fall.
This is also why the last shot of a basket is often much easier than it looks. Once the swarm has been carved into separate hanging pieces, each piece has its own thin attachment, and each one is a one-shot removal.
Bank shots
Your sweet bounces off the left and right walls at the angle it hits them, and it never bounces off the ceiling — it sticks. That gives you two useful things:
- Reach under an overhang. A gap tucked beneath a shelf of sweets is unreachable in a straight line and trivial off the wall.
- A steeper angle than you think. Aiming almost flat into the wall gives you a long shallow path that slides deep under the swarm before it touches anything.
The aiming line drawn on screen includes the bounce, so you can see exactly where a bank shot lands before you commit to it.
Combos
Clearing on consecutive shots builds a combo, and the combo raises the value of each clear — the multiplier grows by half again for every shot in the chain. Breaking the chain resets it. In practice that means a run of three medium clears in a row is worth more than one enormous clear followed by two misses, so when you are playing for score it pays to take the certain shot rather than the spectacular one.
Finishing a basket also pays a bonus, and the bonus is larger the fewer shots you took to get there. Efficiency is scored, not just survival.
Ceiling pressure, level by level
Every basket sets its own patience: how many shots that pop nothing it will tolerate before pushing a new row in. Basket 1 gives you nine; by the last baskets it is five. That single number is most of the difficulty curve, and it is why "just fire something" costs more later than it does early on.
| # | Basket | Colours | Dead shots before a new row |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | First Contact | 3 | 9 |
| 2 | Crosscurrent | 4 | 8 |
| 3 | Cut Diamond | 4 | 8 |
| 4 | Trellis | 4 | 7 |
| 5 | Chandelier | 5 | 7 |
| 6 | Pillars | 4 | 7 |
| 7 | Lattice | 5 | 7 |
| 8 | The Bridge | 5 | 6 |
| 9 | Cathedral | 5 | 6 |
| 10 | Deep Field | 6 | 6 |
| 11 | Undertow | 6 | 5 |
| 12 | The Trench | 6 | 5 |
Three habits worth having
Clear a colour out entirely when you can
The sweet you are given next is drawn from colours still on the board. Removing the last of a colour permanently narrows what you can be handed, which makes every later shot more predictable.
Swap when the barrel is wrong
You can always see the next sweet as well as the one loaded. Tap the queued sweet — or press S on a keyboard — to swap the two. It costs no shot. If the loaded colour has nowhere useful to go and the queued one does, swap instead of firing something into a dead spot.
Work the edges before the middle
The columns against the wall are the ones that get impossible to reach once the swarm descends. Middle sweets stay reachable for far longer.
Do not fire to get rid of a bad sweet
A shot that pops nothing is not free — it is a fraction of a new row. If the sweet in the barrel has no home, look harder for a bank shot, because parking it somewhere useless costs the same as missing.
What is free and what is not
Baskets 1, 2 and 3 are free — no advertising, no account, nothing to install, and unlimited retries. When a basket spills you can restart it as many times as you like.
One optional payment unlocks all twelve baskets and lets you carry on from where a basket spilled instead of restarting it. It is charged once. There is no subscription and nothing is billed again. Buyers in India are quoted in rupees. Paddle.com Market Ltd is the merchant of record, and refunds run 14 days — see Refunds.
Questions
Do I need to download anything or sign up?
No. Candy Orchard runs in the browser tab you already have open. Nothing to install, no account, no email. Your progress and best score are stored in your own browser.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes — it is built for a phone first, portrait, one thumb, and it works with a mouse on a desktop browser too. There are no images or fonts to download, so it starts quickly on a slow connection.
Are there ads?
No. There are no adverts anywhere in Candy Orchard, free or paid, and no video you have to watch to continue.
What happens when a basket spills?
Nothing is lost. You can restart that basket for free, as many times as you want. The paid unlock adds a second option — carrying on from the spill with the deepest rows cleared away instead of starting the basket again.
Is the board random?
The starting layout of each basket is fixed and hand-authored, so basket 7 opens the same way for everyone. The colour you are handed next is drawn from the colours still on the board.