Merge Mansion is a matching game that's all about combining items in a grid. Help Granny Ursula commit murder and arson and keep the family mansion clean, organized, and up-to-code in this addictive mobile game.

Merge Mansion is a popular mobile game that has turned into a social media phenomenon with some clever viral marketing. While the Merge Mansion app is a simple matching game that involves putting items of similar types together to level them up, the game's ads and social media accounts tell stories of conspiracy, murder, and maybe even cannibalism.

In Merge Mansion, you play as Maddie, a young woman. It's revealed that Maddie's grandmother, Grandma Ursula, was involved in a house fire before the events of the game. Grandma Ursula was strangely unconcerned with the fire and instead focused on retreiving something from a safe while the house burned down.

Not long after, Maddie was set to marry a man named Arthur. At some point during the ceremony itself, Arthur left the wedding, leaving Maddie single. Maddie's house then burned down, presumably with Arthur in it, leaving her with no home. As luck would have it, however, Grandma Ursula (who was conspicuously not at the wedding) is happy to let Maddie live at the old family mansion. The catch? The mansion is in a state of utter disrepair. This means that Maddie will have to work extra hard to turn it into a place where she can live.

To make matters worse, a city inspector named Roddy shows up and deems the mansion unfit to live in. Maddie manages to convince Roddie to let her stay in the house if she cleans up the driveway and a few other surface imperfections. it's implied through the advertisements that she begins to sleep with Roddie as a part of this deal, but the ads reveal an additional, more disturbing fact: Roddie is in bed with Grandma Ursula, perhaps literally. 

The next chapter in the narrative involves Grandma Ursula getting arrested and hauled off to prison. As she leaves, one of three notes is revealed on her hand: "he's alive," "you're next," or "I planned this." The driver of the police car looks suspiciously like Roddie, deepening the conspiracy, and Grandma Ursula is released soon after.

After the car ride, the game's marketing team went into overdrive, producing near movie-quality shorts with award-winning actors. These shorts imply a number of frightening truths: Grandma Ursula is a murderer, her obsession with pies might have something to do with her hobby of killing people, and she's left a long trail of bodies in her wake. The shorts seem to hint that Grandma Ursula is driving everyone out of Maddie's life, showing her threatening Arthur and implying that she burned down both her and Maddie's houses. Fan theories suggest that Ursula might be grooming Maddie to be her successor, murdering people and baking them into pies. Alternately, she just wants a housekeeper she can trust.

At its core, Merge Mansion is a simple matching game with none of these story elements present in its gameplay. There are very, very vague hints in a few item descriptions and lines of dialogue, but the web shorts and ads have hardly any connection to the gameplay of the app itself. It's a fun game, but it's nothing like the ads that have made it a viral sensation.

Merge Mansion is a game about patience, resource management, and pattern recognition. Each level of Merge Mansion has you merging together various items. Combine two similar items of the appropriate level and you'll get a single item of a higher level. Certain items will spawn more items periodically, enabling you to have a steady stream of fresh stuff to merge.

Merging is such an important concept in Merge Mansion that you'll actually want to do it with many of your rewards. Rather than opening piggy banks or chests, it's recommended to merge them together for several days and then open the max level result. You don't even want to tap a level two piggy bank before merging it, as this will dramatically reduce your rewards. This means that you'll need to exercise patience as you play through the game in order to get the most out of your free rewards.

When it comes to bronze coins and experience points, merging is no less important. Make sure that they're level 5 (for stars) and 6 (for coins) respectively before you do anything with them. These resources are vital for gaining more storage space, which is key to progressing through the game.

Speaking of storage space, while this commodity should be a priority, be cautious of overspending. Storage space should definitely be the thing you spend most of your coins on, but the cost of more space nearly doubles each time you buy more. This means it's a good idea to keep a healthy buffer of coins for quick purchases.

Should you find yourself running out of space, do your best to avoid selling source items. These powerful spawners can be a big pain to get back. The broom closet in particular should be treasured at all costs. You'll want to prioritize spawning things from the broom cabinet early and often due to how rarely broom cabinet items appear and how important brooms are for various quests and challenges. You might even need to buy bolts and screws for gems to level up your closets.

Your storage space should be organized. Different people will have different preferences in terms of how they like to organize things, with some people putting different sources in each corner, others forming a big block of sources at one end of the screen, and others organizing items by type. You can do things however you'd like. The important part is that you should be able to quickly find your sources, the items spawned should go to a part of the board that makes sense, and you should reduce clutter to make finding matching items easy.

As far as sources go, one final bit of advice is to hold off on merging these until you're running out of space. Leveling a source will increase the frequency of its spawns, but you'll still get more overall stuff from two sources than one higher-level source. Think about your energy, the items you need, and how much space you have when deciding whether or not to merge sources. More often than not, you'll want to keep a few sources of the same level to boost your rate of item acquisition.

Are you a Merge Mansion master? Is there more to Granny's story that we missed? Do you have secret tips or tricks that can help beat the game's missions, challenges, and events? Let us know in the comments below!