DesignVille: Merge & Design Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Complete Makeovers Fast

DesignVille: Merge & Design is TAPCLAP’s latest title for home renovation and puzzle game enthusiasts and is available on both Android and iOS platforms. The game combines relaxing home design scenarios along with an aptly challenging merge puzzle gameplay.

There are a wide variety of furniture and house improvements to mix and match and beyond choosing what suits your taste best, there are also plenty of areas to put down your chosen furniture piece. The merge puzzle aspect, on the other hand, can be challenging but not pressuring at all and you can play through DesignVille: Merge & Design at such a relaxed pace however you want.

DesignVille: Merge & Design comes with the simplest of mechanics and easiest control settings. The designing aspect of the game as well as the merge puzzle gameplay relies exclusively on a tap and hold control schemes. Considering everything, anyone can progress in their DesignVille: Merge & Design adventure without much help.

However, if you are keen on clearing the puzzle table efficiently as well as accomplish home makeover jobs faster, then we have you covered. Our DesignVille: Merge & Design beginner’s guide features tips, tricks and strategies to help you become the best interior designer and merge puzzle solver!

1. Understand The Basics

There are basically 2 sets of main goals you need to accomplish to progress in DesignVille: Merge & Design. The first is a to-do list that outlines your next targets as far as home renovations and makeovers are concerned, where purchasing a new furniture or item to give the room a new look will cost cash. The current room you are making over in DesignVille: Merge & Design is the most basic indicator of your overall progress.

To earn cash, you will need to spend time on the merge puzzle aspect of the game. By clicking on the icon at the lower right side of the screen, you will be taken to the puzzle board littered with a variety of items scattered about. There are boxes hiding items that you can unlock once you merge successfully close to them but the items revealed are like the rest of the items on the board when you started the puzzle, which are covered in cobwebs.

Items with cobwebs are basically grayed out because you cannot move them or fuse them together with similar items in cobwebs. You can, however, fuse items without cobwebs with them to produce a next level item without cobwebs. There are 2 basic item types that give you random items. These are important items as these are your sources of materials for merging.

There are bags or boxes with a lightning icon on them and tapping on these ones will give you random items that you can fuse together or with items in cobwebs. The designer’s backpack, gardener’s toolbox, and cart with boxes are examples of these.

Each time you tap on the special boxes to get some items, you consume 1 energy, and the special boxes also has limited uses as indicated by the bar at the lower part of their icons. Their inventory will not replenish items until they are completely emptied out and it also takes a while for them to replenish fully. Naturally, you cannot get items from them while they are still replenishing supplies.

For every type of special boxes you will encounter in the game, there are alternative sources of items like the designer’s box and gardener’s box, which can also be tapped to generate items much like their basic counterparts. These boxes, however, will only generate items with cobwebs and should be utilized carefully to ensure you have ample space to merge items. When these boxes are emptied. You can fuse the box itself as these will not replenish their supplies.

Accomplishing goals and reaching certain milestones will earn you treasure chests. Treasure chests contain items that can be fused together to make more supply boxes as well as other useful materials. Note that fusing together supply boxes and having ones at a higher level will more likely yield higher grade items when you tap on them.

Merging items, accomplishing targets, or unlocking other special items can earn you different resources like energy, coins, EXP, and even gems. Like all items on the table, you can merge these as well to exponentially increase your gains.

All items on the board, save for resources and items in cobwebs, can be sold for coins. Coins, on the other hand is a valuable currency you can use to purchase items and energy from the shop, as well as inventory slots.

On the puzzle screen, you can see pending tasks at the left side as well as item details above it if you highlight any item. You can also see unused reward items at the upper right side as well as your inventory below it. At the lower right side of the screen, you can see the shop icon as well as the home icon, which you can click on if you want to buy something or view your renovations, respectively.

2. Prioritize Quest Targets

With renovations made being the indication of your progression in your career as a home designer, you would want to earn cash fast to purchase new furniture and other decorative items for the needed makeovers. Given that the only way to earn cash is to complete tasks relative to the merge puzzle, you should focus on getting tasks done one by one.

Tasks are comprised of items needed by different characters and while the earlier sets only have one item needed, latter requests can be a combination of 2 different items. Tasks also come in sets and you have to fulfill the current group’s requests before a new set arrives. One thing to keep in mind is that you earn cash with each objective accomplished so you can visit the home renovation scenario at any time to continue spending cash and progress through the episode.

Prioritization as far as individual targets can vary from one scenario to the next. Sometimes, a request with only one item needed can be more challenging to accomplish than another request having 2 items needed. There is also a matter of availability in terms of your special supply boxes as it is given that they have limited number of items to churn out at a time.

The earlier sets of objectives are much simpler as the items in the board will also be fairly limited. Just the same, you should start to get to know how to prioritize completing quests and take them on strategically to earn cash at a faster pace.

3. Learn To Manage Empty Spaces

There should not be much difference as to how you go about completing requests to earn cash if there is an unlimited space for items on the board. However, a big chunk of what actually makes DesignVille: Merge & Design challenging is the space management aspect of the puzzle. To start off, there are already numerous items on the board, most of which are in boxes or have cobwebs. These items add an extra layer of challenge to managing space as you tap on your supply boxes for items.

As easy as this is when you only have a few types of items on the board, you will quickly have a mixed variety of item types that can make the merging process more complex than expected. Pair that up with higher level request items and you will quickly find yourself struggling to maintain sufficient empty spaces.

One of the tricks we utilize here relates to how we go about completing quests. Once a set of requests have been outlined at the left side of your screen, you should already start planning on which ones to accomplish first and which ones to save for last. In almost each set, you will find an item you may not be familiar with at all, making them suitable candidates for targets saved for last.

In the case of the target items you are already familiar with, determining which ones are easier to obtain becomes the next step. The quests that are easiest for you to clear naturally should be top priority, even in cases when 2 different items are requested.

There are no time limits or any pressure imposed on the merge puzzle itself. This means that you can take as much time as you need to double check on those cobwebbed items that can be merged with the ones you pull out from the supply boxes. In the event that you can merge 2 identical items together, it should always be a priority that one of them has a cobweb.

Note that successfully merging a cobwebbed item will reveal adjacent boxes around it, leaving more cobwebbed items that you can target to eliminate moving forward.

4. Familiarize Yourself With Item Types And Sources

There is an overabundance of items to merge in DesignVille: Merge & Design. While it is not necessary to memorize each one by their levels to determine which item will pop out next, it is important to at least be able to identify the item type and which supply box you can get the item from.

Having good knowledge of item types and sources will lead you to strategizing on quest completions more efficiently as you can work on completing targets by type in addition to going about them from the easiest down to the most difficult.

When you tap on an item, you can check the set they belong to by clicking on their picture at the upper left side of your screen. The brush, as an example, belongs to the cleaning tools while the liquid soap belongs to the cleaning agents set.

Both sets can be acquired from the cleaning cart. Note that each supply box is a source of at least 2 item sets but sets are very much related. Certain levels of merging award you with EXP. Each item can be sold for coins and higher level types of each item can be sold for more coins.

When you uncover new item types through merging, you can claim rewards for each one via their set window. If you tap on an item’s photo at the upper left side of the screen, a window will pop up showing the number of items in the set the item belongs to. For each item unlocked in the set, you can claim coins or gems based on the type or classification of the item Supply boxes typically reward you with gems while normal items give you coins.

5. Keep The Board Organized

Another great way to help you manage empty spaces on your board relates very much to how you organize the board itself. Surely enough, there will be items in cobwebs that you cannot move and you need to work around on but as you clear more of those items and have more tiles allocated for movable items, then you can organize items to make it easier to find what you need.

Not making an effort to clean up the board will lead to a cluttered layout consisting of a lot of items you do not need as well as some you might easily miss. Most especially once more and more item types become available for you, it can become an added layer of challenge to find what you need despite them already being on the board. What you want to avoid are instances when a webbed item could have been utilized in a merge, saving you energy and pace to try and generate that item.

What we recommend for starters is too set up the supply boxes at the top of the board, lining down items that come from that box below them. If not entirely possible, at least make an effort to bring related items close to one another. While utilizing this tactic will take a little more time than just simply pulling items off the boxes and merging them as much as possible.

Keeping the board organized is guaranteed to leave you more empty tiles, to the point of even being able to afford keeping a set of tiles for special items awaiting duplicates to merge with. Examples of these are coins, EXP, energy, and gems.

Again, as these valuable resources can also be merged, it is best to make an effort to consume them once they reach a high enough level. Doing so will reap you much better rewards. Beyond these resources, there are also special items you can merge for better results like treasure chests and supply boxes themselves.

6. Invest In Inventory Space

While coins are a basic currency in DesignVille: Merge & Design, they are still very much valuable and should not be spent without much thought. Even if you can earn them from selling items on the board, the rate at which you earn coins is still too little in contrast with what you can spend them on.

You can spend coins to purchase energy and some items for merging at the shop. However, what we recommend is for you to save your coins and invest them in inventory space instead.

In line with keeping the board organized and managing empty spaces, DesignVille: Merge & Design’s feature of having an inventory outside the board is tremendously helpful, more so if you utilize it to the fullest. Although the starting number of 5 slots is already a huge help, you can purchase additional ones starting with 50 coins, with the succeeding ones costing 10 coins more.

It cannot be helped that you will often come across items you cannot use in line with the current set of quests but at the same time you cannot dispose of as well. The resources, for one will take up space on the board and as we recommend that you merge them as much as possible before consumption, they may begin to take up more space on the board than what you can afford. In such cases, you can always keep them in your inventory temporarily.

Treasure chests can only be unlocked one at a time, so if you have more of them just sitting idly on the board, you may want to tuck them away temporarily as well. Sometimes, pursuing a quest item inevitably leads to merging items from the same box that will not be needed for any of the available quests. While there is always an option to sell them for coins, you can also opt to keep some of them for future needs.

Reward items from reaching new levels and finishing episodes and such can be found at the upper right side of the board puzzle screen. These items stock up on top of each other and you cannot choose from among them which one to take out first. For the most part, though, you would want to claim those items and pull them down to the board and while you would also normally want to utilize them immediately, there will be instances as well when you would want to save them for later.

Learning to utilize and expand your inventory will definitely improve how you manage and clean up your board. One important note to keep in mind, though, is that it comes with extended things to keep tabs on. As the number of items in your side inventory grows, you have to keep watch on it as you merge items on the board itself.

Although it is again not necessary to memorize what the exact items are in your inventory, at least be certain to check for duplicates on the board as you do not want to forget considering these items for merging.

7. You Can Regularly Change Your Renovation Designs

While putting up new windows, couches, and other things in and outside the house is simple enough, part of the fun in DesignVille: Merge & Design comes with testing different design combinations out. You might initially be convinced that each completed episode leaves the stage in a permanent state, but you can always make changes to your decisions instantly at the cost of a few coins.

Of course, you may want to do this once you have amassed more coins than you can spend but at the very least, it is comforting to know at this point that you can edit your designs to create a different masterpiece.

You can revisit renovations you have made by tapping on the map icon in the design page and choose conquered episodes along with the current one. You can tap on any object you renovated and swipe across the choices. Note that while choosing new designs will cost coins, no additional purchases will be required once you have already bought the specific designs.

As added tips, be sure to visit the shop to claim your free gift each day. Energy can also be replenished at the very cheap cost of simply playing a short video ad. When the supply boxes run out of items and you would have to wait for 105 minutes for them to completely replenish, be sure to take advantage of the ad boosts as well to shave off 30 minutes from the cool down period. The same applies for when you open up treasure chests.

Lastly, attempt to empty out other supply boxes when one of them empties out especially if you are about to exit the game for a while. As you will be waiting for them to stock up items you might as well generate as many as you can before leaving the game. You will have a lot of items you may not need soon but these items are basically coins if you sell them.

That wraps up our DesignVille: Merge & Design beginner’s guide and we hope you picked up a lot from the simple tips and strategies that we shared. If you have stumbled upon some useful tips or tricks you feel are worth sharing, do not hesitate to do so and tell us about them in the comments!