Gardenscapes Level 118 Guide: How to Clear Crates and Find Gnomes

To beat Level 118 in Gardenscapes, your immediate priority is breaking the central wooden crates to let pieces cascade into the lower board. Once the board opens up, focus on detonating power-ups in the bottom rows to clear multi-layered grass and uncover all hidden gnomes before exhausting your move limit.

Clear Central Blockers First

Level 118 restricts piece flow with a dense cluster of wooden crates running through the middle columns. Leaving these blockers in place starves the bottom rows of fresh pieces, preventing you from setting up four- and five-tile matches.

Spend your first turns dismantling the barrier using direct matches:

Target shared edges: Match regular pieces adjacent to crates. Prioritize moves that touch two crates simultaneously to double the damage.
Favor vertical alignments: Vertical matches alongside crates let falling pieces drop directly into the cleared spaces, frequently triggering secondary matches.
Punch through the center: Open the middle columns first to establish a steady downward flow of pieces into the lower grid.

Avoid making standard three-piece matches on the upper edges if they do not damage a crate. Every turn spent without breaking blockers limits your board space and reduces your chance of spawning explosives.

Generate Explosives in the Lower Board

After clearing the central bottleneck, shift your focus to manufacturing power-ups near the bottom of the screen. Detonating explosives low on the board forces wide columns of tiles to fall, triggering automatic chain reactions and charging your Rainbow Blast meter faster.

Booster Type	Creation Requirement	Blast Radius	Tactical Role
Firecracker	Match 4 pieces in a line	Cross shape (1 tile in each direction)	Chipping isolated grass edges or single crates
Bomb	Match 5 pieces in a T- or L-shape	2-tile radius (up to 13 tiles)	Clearing dense grass patches over gnome bodies
Dynamite	Match 6 pieces in a line or L-shape	3-tile radius	Sweeping large sections and rapidly charging Rainbow Blasts
TNT Barrel	Match 7 or more pieces	4-tile radius	Resetting crowded boards and clearing heavy obstacle layers

Maximize Rainbow Blast Value

Detonating power-ups charges the Rainbow Blast meter. Because the grass concealing the gnomes requires multiple hits to remove, avoid triggering a Rainbow Blast as soon as it appears unless doing so directly advances your objective.

Use these two methods to get the highest return from a Rainbow Blast:

Target gnome-covering colors: Identify which piece color is most prevalent directly over covered gnomes. Triggering the Rainbow Blast on that color strips away grass layers across multiple target tiles at once.
Combine with an explosive: Swap a Rainbow Blast with an adjacent Bomb or Dynamite. This duplicates that explosive across the board and detonates them simultaneously, clearing heavy grass layers throughout the layout.

Uncover Gnomes Efficiently in the Late Game

Gnomes occupy distinct footprints ranging from single-tile statuettes to larger multi-tile shapes. When your move count runs low, stop matching pieces over random grass.

Target confirmed outlines: Once you reveal part of a gnome and can identify its shape, concentrate all remaining moves strictly on the tiles covering the rest of that statue.
Create distance explosives: If you cannot match directly over a hidden gnome tile, build a Firecracker or Bomb nearby instead of making an unhelpful three-piece match. An explosive detonated two rows away can clear the required tile and shuffle the surrounding pieces into better positions.