Alchemy: Merge Elements

Alchemy: Merge Elements starts you off with a small set of basic elements and asks you to combine matching pairs together, merging up a long discovery chain toward rarer and rarer results the further you progress. Because a merge only works between two identical elements, spreading basic elements out across the board rather than clustering them randomly can make it harder to actually bring matching pairs together when you need to combine them. Early merges are simple and plentiful, but as the chain climbs toward rarer elements, the raw materials needed to produce them become scarcer, so planning which basic elements to preserve rather than combine immediately becomes an important part of reaching the higher tiers. Its steadily expanding discovery chain gives simple pair-merging an ongoing sense of progress toward genuinely rare, hard-to-reach results.