reading this made me smile ear to ear hahaha!!!
So a plain match is just worth 0.2 mult on its own. Chaining into another match will double that value. so a 4 long chain is worth 0.2+0.4+0.8+1.6 mult, if you just want to build stairs across the bottom of the screen. The game is structured around making 12 piece bags of 6 card pairs to make achieving chains much more feasible even with so many colors/suits in play.
Combos are worth even more: where every link is multiplied by two, combos are squared by each additional match you make, so a common pattern of play would be to make a chain, and then end that chain in such a way that you clear 4, 6, even 8 cards at once.
Playing like this can yield scores of over 4k in a level, even if your only yaku is 5 brights and the viewings. The game is...not balanced around you always succeeding at this, and just expects you to get around 1-1.5k per level in Novice.
I'm really glad you enjoyed it, and in the future when I get around to adding some of the other Quality-of-Life features, I'll create a guide to some of the standard patterns of play.