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Keep the lamp on a night harbor: swing the lighthouse beam across the dark sea so the boats can see the reefs and steer home. Boats left in the dark drift off course, and the night only gets busier.
Touch or drag anywhere on the sea and the lighthouse turns its beam toward your finger; when you let go the beam stays where it is. A boat inside the beam can see, so it steers around the reefs and heads for the gap between the two breakwaters by itself. A boat in the dark slowly veers off its course. Three wrecks and the night is over.
The lamp is heavy: it swings at most about 195° per second, so moving from one side of the sea to the other takes most of a second. Plan your sweeps rather than jumping around.
A boat that is about to hit something within the next 2.5 seconds if it stays in the dark shows a pulsing red ! mark. Light it and it will correct its course.
You lose a heart when a boat strikes a reef, runs into the breakwater, drifts out into the fog at the edges of the sea, or touches another boat (both boats sink, one heart).
Every boat that reaches the harbor scores 10 points plus up to 20 more for the share of its voyage it spent in your light, so a boat lit the whole way in is worth 30 and one that found the way alone is worth 10.
The first boat waits on the horizon until you touch the screen; after that boats arrive about every five seconds at first and faster and faster with no limit. They also sail faster, veer harder in the dark, start coming in from the sides after 45 seconds, and a new reef breaks the surface every 35 seconds.
Light boats where the danger is, not where they are. A boat on open water with nothing in front of it can be left in the dark for a few seconds; the moment it lines up with a reef or the breakwater, it needs you. The red ! is a 2.5-second warning, which is about enough to swing the lamp across half the sea and give the boat time to turn, so treat it as a request, not a suggestion.
Because the lamp swings at a limited speed, the order of your sweep matters more than speed of your finger. Work around the sea in one direction, pausing on each boat that is near trouble, instead of jumping back and forth between the far left and the far right. Boats that line up behind each other along the same beam direction can all be lit at once, which is the cheapest light you will ever give.
The last stretch is the most dangerous. Every boat converges on the same 64-pixel gap, and a boat that drifts in the dark right next to the breakwater has no room to recover. Give the final approach a short burst of light even if the boat looks on course, and let boats near the mouth queue: a lit boat slows down and gives way to the one ahead of it, while two boats in the dark will happily sail into each other.
The score rewards the share of each voyage spent in your light, so a long, patient escort of a single boat is worth up to three times a boat that wandered in alone. Early in the night, when boats are few, escort them all the way for 30 points each; later the arrivals come too fast for that and saving every boat matters more than lighting each one perfectly.