the "score" on the bridgebasher leaderboard is the cost of your bridge that successfully got all the word trains across the span. the word trains get progressively heavier until the "impossibly heavy" finale. note that your bridge does not have to remain intact. as long as the words get across the span your bridge is deemed successful. it's not too hard to build a successful bridge for around $900. if you tweak and experiment you might get it down to around $700 or so. now read on...
...I woke up to find someone named Jon had submitted a score of $215. This was not possible. I was certain it was a hacker who had sniffed out my Leaderboard service. I scrambled to my iPhone and loaded the suspicious bridge and ran the Word Test. I watched in disbelief as Jon's solution did something I had never thought was possible. He had figured out a trick that nobody else had. He is not cheating. He is not a hacker. I am completely blown away by the ingeniousness of his design.
From the blog post here (read it, it's good)...
Discussions on that blog post reveal the designs that get these low scores involve an unstable structure that collapses into some kind of ramp that can launch the word trains over the ravine under their own momentum. The handful of people who have figured it out are guarding their secret and battling each other to even lower scores.
Currently the best score is $132.
Anyway what I am trying to tell you is, get this game for your iPhone. BridgeBasher. And look for
SimplePhysics, the follow up game by Andrew Garrison, in the near future.
