Keep a little ray of sunshine in your pocket all year round with this popular beach-based merge game. Every level throws up new surprises, as you never know what treasures you might find buried in the sand.

Travel Town is the kind of destination any fan of merge games will want to visit again and again. This seaside settlement has seen better days, so it’s up to you to help restore its buildings to past glories.

The best place to start is at the beach, where tapping buckets, baskets, crates and other containers will fill the game board with items waiting to be matched and merged. You need to be strategic in your beachcombing, however, because you can guarantee that a succession of townsfolk will show up with orders they want you to fulfil. Generate the items they require and they’ll exchange them for coins, which you can then invest in upgrading the town.

Beyond the satisfying gameplay, there’s plenty going on in Travel Town. There are hundreds of items to uncover, while the town itself is a sprawling metropolis ready to be unlocked. If you’re feeling sociable you can also follow text chats with the friendly locals, or invite real-life friends to stop by.

A tidy beach is a better beach all round. Space is at such a premium in Travel Town – especially when you’re on a mission to attain higher-tier items – that it pays to get into good, clutter-free merging habits early on. Match objects as soon as you can, keep your eyes peeled for new orders and take advantage of the inventory – a holding area where you can put surplus objects aside for later – as soon as it’s unlocked.

Any time you’re wondering what a particular item is made of, tapping the info bar at the bottom of your screen will tell you the full – often lengthy – sequence of objects you need to merge.

You need 512 basic items to combine for the 10th item in a standard merge sequence; for the 15th item, that figure goes up to 16,384. That’s a lot of merging!