First revelation: Small starting area + color clusters = randomizer rigged against the needed colors?
Starting layout:
After 6 moves: note the lack of blue and purple candies
After 7 more moves: still a dearth of blues
After 10 more moves: where are the blues?
Okay, so: In levels with a small starting area, the randomizer is strongly biased against certain colors to ensure that you don't stay stuck in a small area for most of the moves.
In pretty much all of my attempts on this level that didn't immediately annihilate the color clusters, I've always been deprived of the one or two colors that I need. The most egregious example was spending about 20 moves accomplishing nothing because the game kept giving me the wrong colors. The randomizer is always extra strict on event levels, but this felt transparently rigged.
Second revelation: the Wheel of Misfortune is rigged to give very low move counts on event levels, especially if you haven't made much progress before losing.
If you look closely, you can see that I'm very close to winning:
In fact, I only needed three moves after the UFO cleared most of the remaining blockers.
However! On almost all of my attempts, I barely made a dent into the bottom half of the level, and the wheel always gave me either 10 or 15 extra moves with no UFO. It kept giving me move counts that were guaranteed not to be enough until I came close to winning. Then, it decided to give me way more than enough.
The 9 or so tries that I spent on this level were quite valuable to me.
