Puyo Puyo Nohoho

The last boss of Puyo Puyo Tsu's easy mode is this frog named Nohoho, which always stacks blocks on the right. Despite the seemly lack of strategy and despite this being easy mode, it took me a fair bit of speed and luck to beat this frog. This stacking style is famously known as "frog stacking", and getting unexpectedly defeated by this frog is just apparently a rites of passage that every Puyo Puyo player goes through.

So then I wondered... how effective are these stacking styles? It seems that in easy mode where there is only 3 colors at play, it's fairly common to build chains by sheer luck, and Nohoho's fast speed can easily crush you. But beyond 3 colors it's not all that great.

Since I have a Puyo Puyo simulator, I tested the first 5000 seeds with constant strategies. Results:

• Nohoho style (repeat lllj 100 times to stack blocks on the right): completes 26 out of 5000 games, average score = 17456.
• Modified Nohoho style (repeat hhj 17 times to stack blocks on the left, and then repeat lllj 83 times to stack remaining blocks on the right): completes 164 out of 5000 games, average score = 14198.
• Modified Harpy style (repeat hhjllljlllj to stack blocks on the left and right sides, with the right side receiving twice as many blocks): completes 361 out of 5000 games, average score = 13381.

So there, the success rate of Nohoho style is pretty low, much lower than all the other blind strategies. But when it does succeed, it can actually score some fair bit of points.

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