Since hearing my honourable battle-brother Sean Bell talking up the Pickford brothers’ Magnetic Billiards on his *other* podcast, I decided to give it a pop. It’s a free download with 20 levels included. If you like it, you have the option of paying £2.50 to unlock another 20 levels and some alternative game modes; if you don’t, you can delete it, also for free.

For a few weeks, Sean and I became embroiled in a high score battle. This is harder than it sounds when your iDevice doesn’t support Game Centre, but helpfully Magnetic Billiards displays your aggregate score on the level select screen. For the benefit of those of you willing to try out the free levels, my final top score (before I moved on to the premium tables) was 219,790.

Considering what a breakthrough 100,000 felt like, I was quite proud of doubling my score! I’m pretty sure I ploughed Sean’s best efforts deep into the ground too, which was a nice bonus. Without having access to Game Centre’s global rankings, I decided to take my case straight to the top.

 

(I continued to play and improve my score for a few more days, obviously)

I only really wanted to gauge my success compared to the rest of the world, but then this happened!

I emailed my address and we had a little chat about scoring strategies (I had just started using my spare lives to set up massive Buzz combo bonuses on my final shots) and a few days later I came home from work to find a jiffy bag on my doormat. And that is how I came to be in possession of an ultra-rare set of real-life cluster shape flipcards!

EXCLUSIVE INFO: The cards include one cluster shape I’d never seen before, called a ‘jam doughnut’ – a ring of one colour with a single ball of another colour ‘trapped’ in the centre. It was worth one full star in each bonus category (which makes it about twice as good as any other cluster) but after painstakingly recreating one in the game I can confirm that they do not actually exist – I just got a regular old ‘ring’ bonus instead.

Ste also mentioned that the top scores including the premium tables came to around 2,000,000, which sounded completely insane. Now that I’ve managed to score 150,000 on one premium table alone, I am starting to understand how it might happen!