Spirit Animals

Spirit Animals (also known as Spirit Animal Monuments) add minor additional features to the game in attempts for less-skilled players to improve their scores. They are similar to special gems in Bejeweled Blitz.

In short, you start the game as a spirit animal (which color it is depends on your rank that you earned on your stats page), but is relatively overpriced in mojo costs (it takes at least 32 games of mojo grinding with no powers to simply use one of them). It does compensate slightly for them, however, by giving you a spirit blast at end of game (which is a lot of points for those who haven't reached their first million yet).

After the end of the game they can be shared. Although spirit animals appear at random prior to starting a new game, clicking on a friend's spirit animal feed guarantees that you will have the option to use them when you start your game, so you can ready your powers accordingly.

The following is a current list of monuments available as of February 2012.

Spirit Beetle

Turn yourself into a beetle. One of the first spirit animals to be introduced in July 2011, it provides a flat 12 seconds added to your timer at the beginning of the game. The difference may not be much, but given that you can collect an extra time ball (or two), it can be potentially game-changing espeically on the highest levels with the best powers. Its current cost is 36k mojo to use, and 45/30/25k on Kroakatoa.

Advantages: Definitly use if you have a double gap strat (or large gap strat) in mind, as in the best cases you can maintain your continuous gap strat for longer (around 150k points per second late game, and up to 800k/sec on the new island). It allowed professionals to hit eight digit scores (and nine in Kroakatoa on one board).

The time gained from the Spirit Beetle is invaluable - the average time per game increases from 1:28 extra time to around 2:00 extra time, and extra time can be at least 2:32 in rare cases. With the strat on some boards giving you 100k+/sec, what can sixty extra seconds give you? A whole lot.

Disadvantages: High cost for low point increases (expect 35% more points than usual on the best games). It is highly recommended you do not use until you're under lvl 80, unless you're going for a score on competitive leaderboards, in which case it will rank you considerably higher.

Best Used With: Timelord, x3, Warp Ball, Wild Shot, Gapple Sauce, Baco Bouquet

Also, you won't get much out of this beetle if you don't have a specific gap strategy in mind.

Spirit Cat

I wonder why cats love fireballs. Anyways, it allows you to fire a single fireball (equivalant to a hot frog shot) at full speed every 13th shot. Its price is 45/30/25k on Kroakatoa.

Advantages: Allows you to prepare gap setups easily as you can carelessly fire balls on the curve making it longer and then using the 13th ball to blast holes in between. It can be used to clear curves to an extent.

Disadvantages: If you have a gap set up, you'll have to count to 13 in your head, as incorrect counting can accidently cause you to fire a fireball and possibly destroying your gap setup.

Spirit Weasel

The weasel's is badass (well, at least the avatar). He specializes in cannons, effectively giving you a fourth power or buffing your cannon power to higher levels. Its price is 45/30/25k on Kroakatoa.

Advantages: It has advantages to players on both end of the spectrum. For those that focus on clearing as many balls as possible, it offers a decent point boost when clearing balls with cannons as they are worth 400 points a piece (compared to 10). Also, they appear a lot more often. Its spirit power is worth twice as much as others (135k at a 9x multiplier, minimum).

For those who focus on gaps, the extra cannon might be helpful in getting to those hard to reach fruit, especially those which are two layers deep.

Disadvantages: You're still limited to only one cannon powerup on the screen at one time (does not apply on Kroakatoa).

Spirit Eagle

Previously in a game, you had to choose between either shot speed, or more fruit appearing. You don't need to worry about that anymore. The eagle offers the best of both worlds. Its price is the most expensive at 55/45/40k coins on Kroakatoa and can require quite a few levels worth of grinding to get those coins back.

The Eagle doesn't make fruit appear faster, but it increases fruit value by 66% (100% on Kroakatoa), and prevents fruit from disappearing on the new island.

Advantages: Allows you to stick to a solid x3/time/epic fruit power strategy, combined with Gapple Sauce = very high points per second endgame. Its extra score from fruit and 75% extra shot speed as well as multipliers appearing faster means the devs really wanted players to get at least a million. On Kroakatoa the shot speed is raised to 175% (almost three times normal shot speed).

Disadvantages: The eagle's fast. Maybe too fast. It's entirely possible for the ball to penetrate the curve entirely without destroying anything. (Although this is true for other spirit animals as well). Also, you might have high value fruit but you'll need to find some way to get extra time to make the most out of it.

Best Used With: Timelord, x3, Epic Fruit, Curvy Fries, Baco Bouquet

Spirit Turtle


Responsible for exploiting two game mechanics, it's probably because it's a native.

The sea turtle is the newest spirit animals introduced at Kroakatoa. Though it lacks the high points from gaps and fruit, its power is unrivaled at being able to get hot frog on demand (by collecting a fruit), and can make up for this by numerous hot frog shots and curve clears. If you rack up enough extra time, with proper strategy it is essentially a game breaker as it is the only known animal to get over 40 million on some boards.

It was released on the week of Dec 4, 2012.

Advantages: It doubles the speed bonus (stacks with Speed Ball power) and can instantly give you hot frog when a fruit is collected, saving you from having to put a lot of speed into clearing curves before too many balls pop out. With Fruit Master and Inferno Frog, you can spit out fireballs more often than any other Spirit Animal and can retrigger Hot Frog if your last hot frog shot hits a fruit.

Game Breaking Advantages: Combined with Curvy Fries, which gives you extra time with curve clears, and effective curve clearing (2-3 shots to a clear), Turtles can last long enough that its curve clears become overpowered and can outperform other animals (the author's record is 6:36). Note most boards cannot be cleared in two shots.

Combined with Chocolate Love, you can accumulate enough time in order to rack up huge combos (not chains) from hot frog shots without worrying much about curve clears, since your last hot frog shot can almost always hit a fruit. (As of March 2013, when you create a combo from a hot frog, your combo bonus starts from your best combo and usually doesn't reset - as long as you stay in hot frog mode.) As combos have a base score of 1000 x combo, large combos (like 50x or more) can rack up in excess of 450k+ points per combo.

The Spirit Turtle was banned from play in April 2013 and will not randomly appear as a monument due to the combo trick being a scoring bug. You can still use them however if a friend was sharing it prior to the ban. It reappared in June without any changes. It can also be done with Bacon to a lesser extent.

Disadvantages: You are still required to grab fruit (which could be tough in some cases) to get that hot frog. Other than that there are no additional bonuses for fruit and gaps. Hot Frogs can destroy gaps if you aren't careful.

Best Used With: Timelord, Inferno Frog, Epic Fruit, Curvy Fries, Chocolate Love

Promotional Items involving Spirit Animals