Disney Interactive
Disney doesn’t want you to play its new iOS game Disney Tsum Tsum; not exactly. What it wants is for you to have played it.
Why? Because it’s a free-to-play game of the sort that will not generate any money as long as you’re actually engaged in the act of playing it. It’s a lightning-fast puzzle game that demands far too much of your attention to hit you up for purchases mid-game. So the design of Tsum Tsum is carefully engineered to get you out of the core game as fast as possible and back into the menu screens, where it has multiple opportunities to remind you of how badly you just did, and how many different ways you might be able to spend some money to improve on that.
Tsum Tsum is a matching game, so it’s sort of like Bejeweled except instead of every matchable niblet being lined up in neat 90-degree grids, they’re a bunch of oblong, stylized Disney character heads resting in an unstable manner in a wide bowl. So you can match things up just as long as they’re sitting relatively close to each other, and if you want to put some English on it you can tilt your phone to roll them around a little.
You might think that with this much fudge factor in the design, it might be very easy to link up huge chains of matching Eeyores, and you’d be right but for the game’s stringent timer. Each game lasts exactly 60 seconds, which doesn’t give you much time to sit back and plan out chains of combos. You can extend your time, but only by a few seconds and only if you create a seriously massive chain.
Happy with your final score? You won’t be, not once you see what your friends scored. Tsum Tsum is very much a social game, except instead of being connected to your Facebook it’s connected to Line, the Japanese chat application that’s all the rage in many Asian markets these days. (My wife’s whole extended family is on it, to give you an idea.) So you can see your Line friends that are playing, and note that their scores are higher than yours.
How to increase it? You could practice, but that’s only going to take you so far. Plus, you can only play if you have Hearts, and those regenerate at the sluggish pace of one every 15 minutes. So you could not go on a Tsum Tsum bender even if you wanted to.
Fortunately, Tsum Tsum, having created a new problem in your life, now gives you the tools to solve it. You can spend as much money as you like on temporary bonus items that give you a boost during a single game, such as spending coins for the opportunity to get more experience, points, or (yes) coins from your next game. You can’t buy coins with dollars, but you can buy rubies with dollars, and buy coins with rubies, and by that point you’re hopefully not thinking about how many dollars a coin represents. (You can earn coins and rubies through normal gameplay, but it is agonizingly slow.)
But the primary money pit is in the acquisition of more Tsum characters. You can set a character to be your MyTsum, and each of these carries with them a special power into battle. You begin with Mickey Mouse, of course. Mickey Mouse sucks. His power is to eliminate a small handful of characters from the middle of the board, which gives you few points and doesn’t necessarily make the situation any more advantageous.
Disney Interactive
But if you buy different characters, perhaps their powers will help you do better! But of course one does not simply buy more characters. In the grand gacha tradition, you have to spend days’ worth of coins to buy a blind box that contains a random character. The truly great characters are locked away in the Premium Boxes, which cost 30,000 coins (about $6, I think; who can truly know?).
In my experience, the best 10,000 coins I ever gambled was on a regular box to get Dale the chipmunk. He and Chip are the best characters we’ve found so far: They turn an entire line of characters into chipmunks, all of which can be matched up whether they are Chip or Dale. So with some good luck and strategy, but mostly luck, you can drop the chipmunk bomb at the opportune time to put together an insane combo.
Once you’ve achieved a relatively high score, Tsum Tsum attempts to open up your wallet one last time. This is the most devious of all: At the end of a round, if your current score is close to your high score, it asks you if you wouldn’t like to spend 5 rubies (50 cents or thereabouts) to give yourself just a few more precious seconds of time.
The devious part is that it isn’t even done tallying your score yet, and odds are that once the end-of-round bonus points are added in, you may have actually already beaten your high score! And adding a few more seconds, which is only enough to make another couple of matches, likely won’t bump your score up by that much.
I have a confession to make. I did it anyway. Not with real money but with a significant of the tiny stash of free rubies I’d acquired. I actually had a colossal match lined up on the board when I ran out of time, and… well, I knew I was pretty close to rocketing past my wife’s high score. And her sister’s. And everybody’s. So I fell for it. (It was “research” for an “article,” I told myself.) It totally worked, and I boosted my score by at least 20 percent.
But they wipe the scores away every week, so now I’m on the bottom of the leaderboards again.
Disney Tsum Tsum is a fun game in small doses. The touch controls work well, the music is pleasant and it’s just fun to shoot down a whole pile of Piglets when they fall perfectly into place. And to be honest, the gameplay is probably too shallow to hold up as anything more extensive than a 60-second frantic burst of quick strategy. So if you need a timewaster, this could be it.
And if you find yourself too addicted, just take heart: It’s an online application that you’re logging into, so whenever Disney decides to shut it down, it’ll just disappear forever, with no evidence it ever existed.
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