Magic Match Adventures takes place in the Land of Arcania, home to a group of peaceful little creatures called Imps. So lovable and wholesome are these Imps that the game even starts with three of them singing a song about how wonderful they are, reminiscent of "It's a Small World After All", complete with annoyingly repetitive refrain. Trouble comes in the form of a mysterious chuckling voice that makes trouble for the Imps as they pursue their simple, Stone-Age-meets-magic level lifestyle.

The action is split between two environments: the Land of Arcania itself, an overview of the Imp village, which is colorful and well-rendered; and the Magic Realm, a diamond-shaped grid filled with symbols. Arcania is where you'll get a taste of routine Imp life -- fishing, irrigation, cutting down trees -- right before the mysterious voice makes itself known by destroying one of these projects. Say, for example, that a local bridge is demolished by the magic of the Voice. Rather than spending months rebuilding it, the Imps look to you, a fledgling Wizard, to use your magic to fix it. This necessitates a trip to the Magic Realm.

Here's where things get complex. The main window of the Magic Realm consists of a diamond-shaped grid of 100 symbols -- five to start: a blue mushroom, a green fish, a pink flower, a red crab claw, and a yellow snail -- dispersed randomly throughout the diamond. The background of each gridsquare is either blue or green, relating to the Diablo 2-style orbs of those respective colors at the bottom of the Magic Realm window. These orbs are filled with the blue- and green-colored mana that powers your spells for the duration of this level. The object of this portion of the game is to match three or more symbols by highlighting them with the mouse, which removes them from the board, to be replaced with more random symbols. Taking symbols out also adds the colors of their gridsquares to the orbs of mana below. More on mana and spells in a moment.

To the leftmost area of the Magic Realm screen is a vertical list of symbols represented on the grid. Each symbol has a number next to it, representing how many of those symbols you'll need to remove from the grid in order to obtain a red flask of liquid. This flask must be removed from the grid in the same manner as the symbols are, and in fact acts as a type of "wildcard" symbol -- if you have two symbols lined up, the flask will complete the set. Upon removal, the flask will empty itself into the bubbling cauldron in the upper-right corner of the Magic Realm screen.

You must fill this cauldron with enough flask liquids to max out the meter affixed to the cauldron's belly. Doing so will complete the level and grant you the magic spell you need to fix whatever devilry the Voice has wreaked in Arcania. This is a simple matter of clicking your wand upon the mess in question in the Imp village. The wrong is righted, and the next mission plays itself out.