Jumpin' Gem Heist Game Guide

There isn't much to be said about controls, as you do everything entirely with a mouse (or touchpad). The Sandan gives a little jump and tosses its rock when you click, knocking a tray of gems or rocks over for you to catch. Although it may be needlessly complicated to remember the exact point value for each type of gem, knowing that bigger gems give more points is definitely useful. At the beginning, much like most games, the pace is rather slow, and you can catch everything relatively easily. But at the latter levels, the trays of gems come much faster, and you'll have to be much more selective when it comes to catching gems, since you'll have to avoid falling rocks as well.

If you catch five rocks in a row, you get a "combo", which really is a misnomer. The combo in question is just a bonus for catching consecutive gems. As far as I know, there are no specific colour combinations that yield a greater number of points. You get 1000 points for making a combo, but consecutive combos — such as catching ten gems in a row — doesn't stack and you just get another 1000 points for the second combo.

The other bonus in this game is the max stones bonus. When you have all three of your stones (indicated on the lower left corner of the game screen) and you catch another white stone, you get this bonus worth 750 points.

Thus, the scores per object are as follows:

White stone: 750 (only if you have all three stones)

Green gem: 500

Purple gem: 300

Blue gem: 200

Red gem: 100

It's fairly easy to keep all three of your stones in this game, as you only have to make sure you do two things: one, you can't drop the stone you tossed, and two, you can't get hit by a black rock. You aren't penalised directly for dropping gems; you only lose out on getting a combo. This makes the strategy of selectively catching gems possible.

At the higher levels, even if you toss your stone up again and again as quickly as possible, it's still possible to miss a tray of gems in between. This means you really have to decide what you're going to chuck your stone at. Would you choose a tray with one red gem and four black rocks, or a gem with all green gems? That's a fairly easy decision to make, but what about a harder one? Would you choose between a tray with a white rock and a green gem or a tray with three blues and a purple?

The best thing to remember when playing this game is the fact that you can chuck a stone while gems are still falling. Intuitively for most, after you've unbalanced a tray, you wait until the gems have all come down, right? But that's wasting precious time. Time that you can't waste. Treat it like juggling, instead.

On the higher levels, toss a stone, then immediately toss it at another (preferably full) tray before the first tray's gems come down. The white rock always falls faster than the gems, so you have to be careful you catch the white rock. The Sandan probably got hit on the head with gems one too many times, since it doesn't know how to catch all the flying gems before grasping for a new stone. The action of grasping a new stone causes a short delay as the Sandan won't move to catch gems at that time.

And it's also possible to lose two stones at one time. If you get hit by a rock while your original white stone is in the air, you lose a rock for getting boinked on the head, and another one when your stone falls to the ground. It shouldn't be too much of a problem, since I've yet to have a "game over" scenario from losing all three stones. This brings us to our next and most important point: time.

There aren't any time bonuses in Jumpin' Gem Heist, so unless there's a yet-to-be-discovered secret game code, you're stuck with whatever time you have. This makes some sense when you realise how easy it is to keep all three of your lives (or stones, as it were) compared to other games. The bad part, of course, is that it makes getting a high score hard.

Personally, I'm not doing entirely well in this game either as I tend to get in the mid-50k range. The key to this game, probably, is to consistently get the max stones bonus and combo even on the insanely fast-paced levels as you avoid an avalanche of stones. To do this, you have to find a fine balance between chucking your stone indiscriminately at trays of gems and utilising your time as effectively as possible. If you toss your stone up non-stop at various trays, then you're making it more difficult for yourself to get the combo as the gems will be flying everywhere and you're introducing more black rocks. If you add the flaming rocks that come down from time to time, it's even more difficult. But using the "juggling strategy" can easily boost your score by at least 10k, as I can attest to.

In the end, you'll just have to practice to catch as many of the gems as you can. But even if you're aiming to get on the high score table with a score of 79,850, remember that you can beat AAA's score of 45k to get the Sandan Hat. So don't frustrate yourself too much, and have fun. I admit I really want the Sandan Hat myself, as silly as the hat looks.