Format: Facebook
Developer: PopCap
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Having just read Ben Mezrich’s Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook – long story short, if you think you have an idea for a rad website, don’t start out by telling Mark Zuckerberg all about it – I’ve been looking around at the growing number of games available on the social network in order to find one to write about. I haven’t been successful: not because there aren’t plenty of titles that are interesting and clever, but because whenever I sit down to get started on my hunt, I decide that I’ll just have a few quick goes on Bejeweled Blitz first.

The weirdest thing about that is, while I generally adore most of the things that PopCap comes up with, I’ve never really considered Bejeweled 2, the game on which Blitz is based, to be either interesting or clever. It’s always felt like it was just another match-three variant – successful enough in its own way (this may be an understatement: I was once told that a copy of a Bejeweled game gets sold every ten seconds or so) but no better than Zoo Keeper, or Columns, or Puzzle Quest, or a dozen other riffs on the same idea.

But Blitz really is better. I think it’s staggeringly good, actually, and that’s down to two simple reasons.

The first is pleasantly paradoxical: I’ve been wasting a lot of time playing Blitz because the game is at pains to remind players that it won’t actually waste much of their time at all. This is new. Unlike Tetris, which can’t wait to finish you off and get you out the door, Bejeweled games tend to drag on, casual equivalents of the siege of Stalingrad, stretching out the chaining for hour after colourful hour, with no real end in sight until, in a rather sudden and even possibly arbitrary manner, you run out of possible matches and get booted out. Blitz isn’t interested in attrition, however: it advertises itself as a high-score rush, each game built to last exactly one minute – plus the Last Hurrah section in which any remaining unmatched special gems explode lavishly – suggesting you can probably get in a round before loading up Excel or checking the cricket scores.

That’s a total lie, of course. Blitz doesn’t take a minute to play - it takes a minute to play once, but that first go is always just theatre. Any decent Blitz player knows the routine: one round to check the game’s working properly (it always is, but you can never be too careful), one go for pre-warm-up, a couple of sneaky warm-up goes, and then a curtain-raiser... With the leaderboards never too far from view, Bejeweled Blitz actually still takes hours to play as you slowly get back into the zone, work the kinks out of your controls, and start to perfect new strategies. It’s Stalingrad again, but a different, more deadly kind of street fighting, always reminding you that the battle’s only just started, always promising that in just another few seconds you’ll be finishing up. And since that sounds good, why not have another go, eh?
 

This brings us to the second reason for the game’s peculiar appeal. Bejeweled Blitz genuinely understands its platform: it’s rumbled what Facebook truly is, how it really works, and it knows how to use that information to its advantage. PopCap’s game is integrated so deeply into Facebook’s mess of updates and messages – spitting out leaderboard announcements and award notifications every few turns, and allowing you to trash talk rivals with the brilliantly cutting 'Jewel Jabber' mailings – that it feeds directly into your own social network. The result, in other words, is to turn your online acquaintances into entries on an intensely personal high-score table.

It's competition which reflects Facebook in general, really, as you scan through your address book to see who has the most friends, make sure that old flames are still stuck in dead-end jobs or married to the terminally unappealing, or seriously think about deleting anyone who posts wittier updates than you do. There are hundreds of other clever details to Blitz, of course – seamless iPhone connectivity, the fact that the scores reset every week to keep the game fresh and the sheer depth of post-game graphs and breakdowns you can look through – but despite all that, the truth is that much of Blitz's brilliance comes from its transition from a lengthy solo pursuit to a quick-as-you-like social experience.

It’s telling that one of Facebook’s original inspirations was a way for Harvard types to rate the sex appeal of fellow students; at least in the rarefied world of Bejeweled, there’s a little more at work in the rankings than just that.