Christmas Balloons

Balloons printed with festive patterns rise across the whole screen: snowflakes, reindeer, tasselled hats. The task is blunt. Pop everything before the round closes. No layered conditions, no special commands to memorise before starting.

Those patterns are pretty and they carry a cost. When two balloons overlap, the continuous print fools the eye into reading them as a single object, so taps miss more often than they should. The fix is to ignore the pattern and follow the outline of each shape instead, since outlines stay separate even where the printing does not.

The other thing that genuinely moves the score is the order you work in. Balloons near the top edge escape before any of the others, so sweeping downward from the top loses fewer of them than starting in the middle where your hand naturally reaches.