as for the "board difficulty", I doubt that goes up much- it should be mostly random, with perhaps some colors eliminated/more prevalent- its the opponents that generally get stronger. As for "abusing the game to make matches", in the version of this game I played before, that was a FEATURE- some of the units actually had skills that gave you 1-2 seconds longer to move your stone to make matches. So unless you can consistently make a 5 row and 2 more combos each movement phase in your 10 seconds, you're not trying hard enough. I do miss drafting a buddies leader to my party (with their leader skills!)- but perhaps thats a future update.