Review by: Brandon "Dynasty" Cackowski-Schnell

At this point in time it appears that any historical event or narrative can be conveyed via the match three puzzle. How someone could take Othello and turn it into a gem matching game is beyond me but I'm sure there's a game in development for it. Adding to the stable of square matching games is Jewel Master Egypt a sometimes infuriating but always addicting match three game that has you building your Egyptian dynasty one gem match at a time.

The game adds some twists to the now familiar gem matching template, twists that all tie in to the notion that you're building an Egyptian dynasty. Each gem represents a different resource such as cash, food and building materials. As you make matches you get more and more resources, resources that you need to purchase the latest addition to your dynasty. Purchase all of the new dyanstic elements for the particular tier and you can move on to the next tier. As you progress through the tiers you'll get new tiles that bring new resources as well as new tiles that can be used to charge up things such as single dynamite sticks that destroy one tile, collections of dynamite that destroys nine squares or water drops that refill the ever lowering water level that marks the time until your failure.

The goal in the game is to remove all of the blue squares on the board. Once all of the blue squares are gone a scarab will appear. Move the scarab off of the board and the stage is clear. Early levels are simple with only a handful of blue squares to deal with however it doesn't take long until you're faced with unholy combinations of chained, immobile blocks, light blue squares that need to be matched to turn into blue squares as well as unforgiving level design and seemingly random gem replenishment paths. As you fail stages, and you will fail plenty of stages, the board's gems will change allowing you to try different strategies with the various destructive tiles. It's a nice change of pace but at the same time, if you get a board with a less useful destructive tile your job is made that much more difficult from the outset.

Even with the steep learning curve the game is quite addictive and the combination of challenging levels and constantly shifting tilesets means that no two puzzles play out the same way, nor do any two instances of the same board. If the grind of building a dynasty gets to be too much you have the option of playing unlocked puzzles just for the fun of it. Oddly enough the only way to get from the puzzle board back to the main menu is by resetting the DS but it's a minor gripe. If your household contains multiple puzzle heads up to four concurrent games can be stored on the cartridge at one time.

With 100 puzzles, support for up to four players, lots of ever increasing resource and destructive tiles and a casual, non-story based mode there's a heck of a lot of game here for twenty bucks. Casual fans may find the difficulty curve a challenge but the addictive nature of the puzzles will keep them coming back. Using match three puzzles to build an ancient dynasty may not make a heck of a lot of sense but it doesn't keep it from being fun.