Score
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Best
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A claw on a rope swings at the top of the screen. Tap to drop it on gold, diamonds, or rocks below. Heavy hauls take longer to reel back. Beat the timer.
The rope hangs from the top center and swings back and forth at a steady angle. Tap anywhere on the screen to release the claw — the rope extends along the current angle in a straight line until it touches an item or hits the floor.
Gold nuggets are worth 50, small gold nuggets are worth 100, diamonds are worth 250, and rocks are worth only 5 — but they're large and slow to reel up, so a wrong grab eats real time. Once the rope retracts (with or without something on it) the claw resumes swinging.
You have ninety seconds, and the clock starts with your first drop. The swing starts gently and speeds up smoothly for the whole round — by the last seconds it is about forty per cent faster — so timing windows shrink as the run goes on. Each item respawns at a new random position about 1.3 seconds after you collect it. Maximize total value before time runs out.
The expected value of any single drop is governed by what you'd take, weighted by how long that take blocks you from doing anything else. A diamond near the bottom of the screen scores 250 and reels back up in about two-thirds of a second. A rock at the same depth scores 5 and takes more than two seconds to drag up — over three times as long for a fiftieth of the value, and close to the time a whole extra drop would take. The math is unforgiving: skip every rock unless you genuinely have nothing else in reach.
Misses cost the same time as a no-grab rock dive. The rope extends to the floor, retracts empty fast (1.6× speed), and you're back swinging in about 1.5 seconds. That's not free, but compared to grabbing a rock it's a discount. Treat the rope as cheap to throw and expensive to fill with the wrong thing.
The pendulum is sinusoidal — it moves fastest as it passes straight down and slows almost to a stop as it turns round at each end. So the rope spends the least time per degree over items directly below the anchor, and those need the sharpest timing; items out at the widest angles are the easiest to time because the rope lingers there before swinging back. Wide angles do mean a longer path to the target, so a diamond tucked into a corner still costs travel time. Learn the feel on items out to the side where the rope pauses, then work on the centre where it whips past.
Later in the run the swing keeps speeding up — about forty per cent faster by the final seconds — and the window for a precise drop shrinks. The claw leaves along exactly the angle the rope has at the instant you touch the screen and then travels in a straight line, so tap when the rope itself points at the target; there is nothing to lead. When the swing gets quick, the cheapest way to keep scoring is to favour targets near the ends of the arc, where the rope still slows down to turn.