Noodles

Chapter 5, Chinese Classics, is full of long food: hand-pulled noodles, rice noodles, glass noodles, bamboo skewers, the string around Dongpo pork and the straw in a soup dumpling. They all follow one rule, which first appears in level 81, Lanzhou Beef Noodles.

The rules

• A noodle is a strand of cells drawn as one tube. It can only be eaten from an end, one cell at a time.
• An end that can be slurped has a white dot. It still has to be exposed like any other block.
• The middle of a noodle cannot be bitten, even when it lies on the edge of the picture or next to an eaten cell.
• Each bite frees the next cell, so once the ants start at an end they can follow the noodle all the way, wherever it goes.
• The Machine Gun can still break a noodle in the middle; that gives it two new ends.

What noodles do to a level

Everywhere else in the game, a picture is eaten from the outside in. Noodles break that rule both ways. A noodle with a free end is a tunnel: slurping it carves a path into the core and exposes inner colours long before their turn. A noodle whose ends are both buried is a wall: it blocks the cells behind it until you dig to one of its ends. Where a level puts its noodle ends decides when that happens, so they follow the level's difficulty curve.

Tips

• At the start, look for the white dots: they show which noodles you can open right away.
• Before slurping a long noodle, check what it will uncover; a tunnel into the core is only useful if the colours there are coming soon in the tray.
• A noodle colour in a slot only works at the ends, so a buried noodle colour sent early just blocks a slot.