How to Play

Carla's Compass: Merge Legacy is a merge game with a story running through it. You combine items on a board to make better ones, fill the orders people bring you, and every so often the next piece of Carla's search for her father opens up. If you have never played a merge game before, the whole of it fits in one sentence: put matching things together and see what they become.

You do not need to read this to start. The game teaches each mechanic as the story reaches it, and the prologue is a guided tutorial. This page is here for when you want to look something up.

Merging on the board

The board is where most of the game happens. Items sit on a grid, and dragging one onto a matching one combines them. Three of a kind make the next item up the chain, and that result merges again with its own matches, so a handful of small finds becomes something worth having a few steps later.

Two things are worth knowing early.

  • Merge six or more at once and you get a bonus item on top. It is often better to wait until a bigger group has built up than to merge the first three you see.
  • Space is a resource. Much of the board starts hidden, tiles marked with a question mark are revealed by clearing the ones around them, and a full board is the most common reason a run stalls.

Some items arrive inside a bubble. Tap the bubble to pop it before you can use what is inside.

Producers and resources

Producers are items you tap to get more items out of them. Some simply run dry. Others need resources before they will do anything: merge the right resource item onto the producer to refuel it, wait for it to charge, then tap it. Higher level resources refuel it faster.

The fishing event is the clearest example of the pattern. Bait is the resource, the rod is the producer, and a fed rod starts fishing and can be tapped for a catch once it is ready.

Orders

Characters turn up with orders: a short list of items they want. Filling one clears those items off your board and pays you in coins and merit, and some orders hand over items you cannot get any other way.

Story orders are the ones that matter for the plot. They are tied to a named character, they appear once, and finishing one opens the next scene.

Merit, levels and the story

Merit is the game's experience. You earn it from orders and from drops on the board, and it raises your level.

Your level is what paces everything else. Features unlock at particular levels, the reward track pays out at each new one, and story beats wait for a level as well as for whatever item or order they need. That is deliberate: it stops the story running out ahead of the board.

The story itself is told in chapters, in animated scenes, character dialogue and the occasional small puzzle. The board never stops for long, and when a chapter's story is finished you can go on playing its board whenever you like.

Running out of room

Three ways to clear space, in roughly the order worth trying:

  1. Fill orders. The items leave the board and you get paid for them.
  2. Use the inventory. Drag anything you want to keep but do not need right now into the satchel, and drag it back out later. More slots can be bought with gems.
  3. Sell or trash. Some things really are junk, and the game will tell you when an item has no further use.

Collections and recipes

Every item you discover is catalogued in your Collection automatically. Each new one pays a small reward, and completing a whole set pays a bigger one.

Recipes record the combinations you have unlocked, so once you have made something the game will remind you how. Tap any item to see what it produces, what produces it, and where it sits on its merge chain.

Explore Mode

Tap the magnifying glass to step behind the board into the scene itself. Look for the alerts dotted around it and tap them to collect what is hidden there. As you get further into a chapter, new things appear to find.

Challenges

Daily and weekly tasks: merge so many times, complete so many orders, pop so many bubbles. Clearing your daily set keeps a streak going, and the longer the streak runs the better the rewards get.

Events

Events run alongside the main story, each on a board of its own, and they come and go. You unlock one by finding its gateway item during normal play, and after that you can drop into it whenever you like. Neither one gates the story.

  • Catch of the Day. Feed bait to a rod to start fishing, and merge to upgrade both the rods and the bait for better catches.
  • Excavation. Merge tools onto dirt tiles to dig, layer by layer, for fossils and whatever is buried under them. Deeper layers hold the rarer things.

Both have leaderboards, and scores are submitted for you. Excavation can also be played as a group: add friends to an Excavation Group, work the same site, and send each other a daily gift.

Friends

Open the friends menu to share your invite link or your invite code, or to enter someone else's. Friends appear alongside you in the leaderboards and can join your Excavation Group.

The VIP Pass and the shop

The game is free to play. The shop sells coins, gems and the VIP Pass, which unlocks the VIP reward on every level of the reward track, including levels you have already passed, plus some cosmetics of its own. It does not expire.

Gems are the premium currency, and the most common use for them is extra inventory slots. Coins are the everyday one. Fossils belong to the Excavation event and count towards its rewards.

Chests and the other randomised rewards have their probabilities published on the reward probabilities page. It is generated from the same data the game rolls against, so it states every probability exactly as the game applies it.

Saving your progress and changing devices

You can play without an account. Connecting one saves your progress to the cloud, which is what lets you get it back on another device, and the only way to be sure it cannot be lost.

Open Settings, then Account:

  • Google Play Games on Android and Game Center on iOS keep a save within that platform. An Android save follows you to another Android device.
  • Facebook is currently the only login that carries a save between platforms, for example from a phone to a computer.

Pick the one that matches how you expect to play before you get far into the story. If the game ever asks whether to keep the cloud save or the one on your device, it will show you when each was saved and the level each reached; the one you do not pick is overwritten.

If your connection drops while you are playing you can carry on: progress is saved on the device and syncs once you are back online. A connection is needed to load the game and its content, and for the online features, which means cloud saves, leaderboards, events, friends and purchases.

Where to play

You can play in your browser right now at play.carlascompass.com, on a computer or a phone. That version is an open beta, so expect rough edges. The iOS and Android builds are in closed testing, and the full release on all three is planned for early 2027.

Getting help

The support page answers the questions we get most, and has a search box. If your question is not there, there is a form at the bottom of it. Your Player ID helps us find your account: open Settings, then Support, and use Copy ID to Clipboard.