Hi Sawyer, many thanks again for your video and now for the review! I‘m very glad you liked the game and kept playing.
Yeah, finding the optimal strategy is quite hard, even I am still testing different approaches. Maybe the hardest task is to decide when its time to drop the original plan and to adjust for a new one.
Increasing the speed by game progress was never really an issue for me during designing, since you get under pressure anyway the higher you build. And building high by itself has not be failure in general because it may be part of your strategy to leave out possbile but worthless lines intentionally.
As a reward for managing to complete the game under the final pressure even if the score of the last lines is low I introduced the +25 bonus.