Land Grab Tips: Safe Trails, Big Claims and Ball Timing

Updated October 2026

Land Grab looks like a reflex test, but most of it is geometry. You move on a fixed grid, the red balls move on the same grid, and the game decides what you win with one simple rule about which pockets of water still hold a ball. Once you understand that rule, the board stops looking like open water to nibble at and starts looking like a map you can cut in two. This guide walks through how the grid, the claim and the collisions really work, and turns them into habits that keep your three lives alive for longer.

The board in numbers

The playing field is a grid 24 cells wide and 32 cells tall. The outer two cells on every side start as land, which leaves an open sea of 20 by 28, or 560 cells. The percentage shown in the top-right corner counts only those 560 inner cells, and you clear a level when 75 percent of them are land. In practice that means turning 420 inner cells into land, whatever shape they take.

Your marker starts in the middle of the top edge. Everything moves in whole-cell steps on a fixed clock of 60 ticks per second, so a 120 Hz phone plays exactly like a 60 Hz one: your marker advances twelve cells per second, while each ball takes a diagonal step seven and a half times per second on the opening levels. You are faster than the balls early on, and that speed advantage is the main resource you spend all game. The marker never stops on its own except against the very outside of the grid, so an interior strip of land you claimed earlier is a road, not a parking spot.

What you actually win when a loop closes

When your trail touches land again, every trail cell turns solid and the game looks at the remaining water. It starts from each ball and spreads out through connected sea cells. Any patch of sea that no ball can reach is filled in and becomes yours. Nothing else matters: not the length of your trail, not whether it is a neat rectangle, not which side of the trail you meant to keep.

That has a big consequence. You never need to draw around an area. A single straight cut across the board, from one land edge to another, seals off whichever side holds no ball. With one ball in play, a wall drawn across the sea while the ball is on the far side hands you the entire near side in one move. That is why the strongest single play in the game is a full-width or full-height slice timed so the ball is clearly on the other half.

Your score adds one point for each sea cell captured this way. The trail itself turns into land and counts toward the 75 percent, but the trail cells are not added to the score. Clearing a level adds a bonus of 400 times the number of the level you move up to, so finishing level one is worth 800, level two 1,200, and so on. Over a long run the bonuses grow faster than the area points, which rewards surviving more than squeezing a few extra cells out of each board.

How you lose a life, precisely

A ball checks the cells ahead of it every time it moves: the cell to the side, the cell above or below, and the diagonal it is heading for. If any of those it would bounce against is part of your unfinished trail, you lose a life. Your marker stands on a trail cell while you are out at sea, so a ball about to bounce into your cell counts the same as a ball meeting the line behind you. Steering your marker onto the cell a ball is sitting in costs a life too, so you cannot step on a ball to slip it inside your claim. Running your own marker into your own trail is also a lost life, and the game blocks a straight U-turn while you are drawing so you cannot do it by reversing.

Losing a life wipes the open trail back to water, puts you back at the top centre and freezes the board for a short moment before play resumes. Land you already closed is never taken back. Three lives is all you get, and there is no way to earn more, so the whole run is about not giving one away cheaply.

Two points follow from this. First, a long trail is dangerous not because of its length but because of the time it stays open; every extra cell is another step a ball gets to find it. Second, balls bounce cleanly off land and off closed trails, so the moment you touch land, your line is safe.

Reading the ball before you leave land

• Count its direction, not its position. Balls only travel diagonally. A ball heading away from you on both axes is the safest possible moment to step out, even if it is close.
• Predict the next wall bounce. A diagonal mover reaches a wall, flips one direction and keeps going. If its next bounce sends it back toward the strip you want, wait one bounce longer.
• Pick the short side. If you are cutting across the board, start from the side that is nearer the ball's current far wall, so your fresh trail grows away from it.
• Use the outer wall as a pause button. Steering into the very edge of the grid stops your marker, and while you are on land nothing can hurt you. Waiting there costs no points and no time limit applies.

A practical cutting plan

1. On level one, make your first move a straight cut across the shorter width of the board, about a quarter of the way down, while the ball is in the lower half. That alone captures roughly a quarter of the sea.
2. Repeat the idea from the new edge you just made. Each successful cut shrinks the water and also shrinks the space the ball can roam, which makes its path easier to read.
3. As the sea gets small, switch to short L-shaped trails that leave land and return within a few cells. The ball now meets walls constantly, so long exposure becomes much riskier.
4. When the percentage reads in the low seventies, look for one last straight cut rather than many small bites; a single slice usually finishes the level.

Remember the rule about ball-free pockets when several balls share the board. A cut that splits two balls apart wins nothing by itself, but a later cut that isolates an empty pocket next to either of them wins that whole pocket. With many balls in play, the best targets are corners and edge bays that only one ball can reach.

How the difficulty climbs

Level one has a single ball, and each new level adds one more until there are nine at level nine. From there the count holds, but the balls start moving more often: their step interval shortens every second level, until from level nineteen onward they move more than twice as often as on level one and outrun your marker. After that point the speed stays at its maximum and an extra ball arrives every three levels, with no upper limit. The early levels are where you bank both points and practice; the middle levels are where patience at the wall decides the run.

Because everything is counted in grid steps, the size of your phone does not change how far anything travels. A larger screen only makes the cells bigger and easier to read. Swipes need to travel a little more than one cell's width before the game registers a turn, so short, deliberate flicks are more reliable than long sweeping drags.

Common mistakes

The most expensive habit is nibbling: leaving land, drawing a two-cell bump and returning. It is safe, but it barely moves the percentage and drags each level out, giving the balls more chances to catch a later, riskier line. The second is forgetting that interior land does not stop you. Players steer onto a strip they claimed earlier expecting to rest, glide off the other end into open water and start a trail they never meant to draw. The third is turning back toward a ball to finish a loop. If a ball is closing on your open trail, keep heading for the nearest land in a straight line rather than turning, because every turn adds cells the ball can reach.

Your best score stays on your device, and any score above zero can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.