Not the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer

When I was on my mission, there was a man in line at the soup kitchen where my companion and I were serving a meal who declared that I was "a couple books short of a full Bible." He went on to say, "You's missin' Axe and Duterominy."  Unfortunately, I've proven him right MANY times over the years. 
Tonight, I was playing a game on my cell phone: Shape Shift.  I've already deleted it twice from my phone because I waste WAAAY too much time with it whenever I open it up.   It consists of a screen made up of many boxes; the boxes can be one of four colors, and on each box is one of three shapes (circle, square, or triangle).  You move the boxes around by choosing two boxes with the same shape on it (i.e., a green box with a triangle, and a yellow box with a triangle) and the game will then switch their places on the screen.  When you have 4 boxes of the same color touching, they explode and disappear, and new boxes are fed in from the top of the screen.  Silly, I know, but something about it is highly addictive.  Maybe it's the explosions, or the consequent explosions that your initial explosion can cause, because as the exploded boxes disappear, everything above it shifts down to fill in the gaps.  If that shifting causes more boxes of the same color to connect, they too will explode.
 In "Classic" mode, you have the added excitement of bombs inside some of the boxes, with timers on them.  If you fail to get three (or more) boxes of the same color to touch that bomb's box, before it gets to "zero", then you lose and the game is over. 
As I was playing, I had a bomb quickly counting down to zero, and I was getting a little frantic trying to get the right color/shape combination over to it before it hit zero.  Ben, who was sitting next to me observing all of this--and who, to my knowledge has never played this game--says, "You don't need to get all stressed out about it, it's not a timer.  It just shows how many moves you have left to take care of that bomb. Did you see it go from 5 to 4 when you did that?"
Excuse me?  Who has played this for too many hours to count??  And who has just been observing for five minutes??
Patronizingly, I responded, "No, it is a timer, and if you don't take care of it before it goes off, you lose.  It has nothing to do with moves."  I go on to explain, slightly more patiently,"It's not in seconds, though.  You have to keep your eye on the bombs, because sometimes they count down fast, and sometimes they count down more slowly."

Um, ... ya, after a few more minutes playing, with his observation starting to penetrate my thick skull, it became apparent: he was right.  How could I have never figured that out??  It must have been in explained in "Duterominy."