Jewel Quest

Jewel Quest is an Indiana Jones-inspired puzzle game created and published by iWin. First for PC, and later it has been redeveloped for Symbian S60, the Nintendo DS (Jewel Quest : Expeditions), the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade and other platforms. iWin also released sequels entitled Jewel Quest 2, Jewel Quest Solitaire, Jewel Quest 3, Jewel Quest Mysteries: The Curse Of Emerald Tear, Jewel Quest Mysteries 2: Trail of the Midnight Heart and Jewel Quest Heritage.

Basic Match 3 Puzzle
Jewel Quest is a 'match 3' puzzle played on an 8 X 8 grid filled with various tokens, e.g. Diamonds, Rubies, Emeralds, Gold Coins, and Skulls. The player may swap any 2 adjacent tiles, as long as it results in making 3 or more of a kind in a row or column. When this occurs, those tiles disappear and tiles above fall into the gaps. If this results in another 3 of a kind in a row, then these disappear etc. until a stable situation is reached. Again the player may swap another 2 adjacent tiles etc.

Tiles falling into the top of the grid are generated randomly.

Whenever tiles disappear, the background grid positions turn gold. When the board is entirely gold, you progress to the next level. If you do not complete the board within a time limit, then you lose a life and must start the level again.

Slight variations on these rules make up the many levels of the game.

Story
Jewel Quest has 180 levels and is set within the Mayan culture.

Jewel Quest II has 180 levels, and after each level you advance along a map representing a journey in Africa. Every 5 or so levels the image behind the puzzle board changes. There is an accompanying story. Additional Jewels were added.

Jewel Quest III's levels range throughout the world. The new Globe interface allows you to select from different regions to play. Mexico, Iceland, Europe, Africa, South America, Australia, China, Alaska, East Asia are the regions. In each region there are several locations to choose from and each level has multiple passes. New to JQ3 is that some of the jewels have special properties.

Scoring and Lives
When you match a set of tiles, you gain points based on the number of tiles matched and the number of "cascaded" matches that have occurred. "Cursed" black tiles appear in later levels; directly matching a set of these deducts points and erases the gold behind them. However, the cursed tiles can be safely removed as a "cascaded" match.

When you run out of time on a level, or reach a point where there are no moves possible, you lose a life and must start the level over.

You are granted an additional life for every 50,000 points earned.