Yumbers: the yummy numbers game – Review

I’ll confess right away that number puzzle games aren’t really my cup of tea. Sudoku never appealed to me, and I know a lot of classic number puzzle games on the app store I’ve let slip past my radar. However, Yumbers was a game that stood out to me. This is a puzzle game about numbers eating each other. That Seven Eight Nine joke from elementary school seems a lot more relevant right now.

The explanation behind Yumbers is a fairly simple one. You want to get rid of all the numbers on the screen. You need two twos to get rid of them, and three threes to get rid of those, and so on and so forth. Numbers can also be combined into higher values. Squeezing a one and a two together transforms them into a singular three. Knowing how to combine the numbers and where to position them is what’s essential.

You can move them anyway you’d like, but there are a few rules that make this a little trickier to master. You can never move a singular number, but you’ll be moving the entire row that number is in, either horizontally, or vertically, and all numbers follow the laws of gravity so be very careful where you let stuff fall as it could ruin an entire run (not really, as there’s an undo button that can let you go back as far as you’d like)

If you get really stuck, you can unlock hints with keys which can be earned by watching ads or bought with in-app purchases. I’ll confess I needed a few of these to get through trickier puzzles, so I do appreciate having a free option to earn them. One of the hints that game will sometimes give you is to tell you how many sets of each number are needed to complete the puzzle. I feel like that’s less of a hint and something that players should have access to check as often as they’d like. I’m also a little upset there’s no instant restart button on the main screen.

Each level has a minimum number of turns needed to beat it, which awards the player with more experience at the end of each stage. I’m not entirely sure what your level means in this game though, so I never worried too much about getting perfect runs.

Yumbers is a fairly cute, charming game that requires a lot of clever thinking and offers nice visuals, solid puzzle design, and a relaxing jazzy soundtrack to accompany it. I don’t think I’ll spend much more time with it, but for someone who really enjoys number puzzlers, I give this game a strong recommendation.