The 15 Best Candy Crush Cheats of 2024

Games

Candy Crush Saga gets punishingly tricky as you move higher and higher into the levels, and buying boosters can get extremely costly. If you want to make the most of your lives or get some free lives in a pinch, we’ve pulled together some of the best Candy Crush tips and tricks to help you boost your scores.

  1. Start your candy crushing at the bottom. When you create matches near the bottom of the level, you can easily create chain reactions to destroy more pieces and get a bunch of points. Creating matches at the top is unlikely to have this effect.

  2. Don’t follow suggestions blindly. If you don’t make a move for a while, the game will look for a match and then show it to you by making the candies shake. This is useful, especially for younger and newer players, but don’t automatically use these matches. A lot of the time, you’ll be able to find a better match on your own.

  3. Try to think ahead when possible. If you just make every match you can see without thinking, you’ll fail the harder levels. Look at how the candies are laid out and think about the moves you can make to create a situation where you can make a color bomb or get pieces into place to clear jellies or other threats.

  4. Learn how to make, and use special candies. Matching three candies together only clears those candies, but matching four or five creates a special candy. These special candies are the key to beating harder levels.

  5. Look for combos, and use the best ones. Combos, like swiping a color bomb into a striped candy, are extremely powerful. If you can maneuver special candies together, they do a whole lot more good together than they would alone.

  6. Use and make striped candy the right way. Striped candy can have horizontal or vertical stripes. The direction you swipe your finger to create the candy matches the direction of the stripes, and the candy will clear a line horizontally or vertically that matches its stripes.

  7. Prioritize specific threats at each level. Don’t just make any old match you can. If a level has specific threats, like licorice or jelly, then take care of them first. If you don’t, you may run out of moves before you can clear the level. If the level has chocolate, go after that first.

  8. Focus on edge jellies. It’s harder to make matches on the edges, so if you have threats like jellies on the edge of the board, try to clear them first.

  9. Don’t move ingredients to the edges. Since it’s harder to make matches on the edges, you should also avoid moving ingredients to the edges. Always leave, or move, ingredients into a column where you will be able to drop them onto a green arrow.

  10. Understand how chocolate works, and deal with it first. Chocolate is a creeping menace that expands to take over more squares each time you make a match anywhere on the board that doesn’t clear chocolate. To clear chocolate, make a match that includes any of the four candies immediately above, below, to the left, or to the right of the chocolate. Use special candies, like color bombs, if you need to.

  11. Look for extra time candies. If you see candies with a +5 icon, try to include them in a match. These are extra time candies, and they show up in timed levels. If you can use one in a match, you get five extra seconds.

  12. Use your boosters sparingly. You will earn boosters as you play, and you can also pay money for them. Save these powerful tools for tough levels, or you won’t have them when you need them.

  13. Reshuffle especially difficult levels. While the layout and goals of a level are set in stone, the positions of individual candies are totally random. If you start a level and don’t like the layout of the candies, you can back out without losing a life if you haven’t made any moves. Start the level again, and you might have better positioning.

  14. Finish levels with extra moves left for more points. If you still have moves left when you finish a level, jelly fish or striped candies will pop up and earn you more points. The more moves, the more chance that this will trigger a massive cascade of extra points.

  15. Set the date forward on your mobile device to get free lives. If you’re having trouble and lose all your lives, and you’re playing on a mobile device, you can set the date on your device forward one day to get five more lives.