Here's a useful bit of advice from Doug's discussion of such matches elsewhere on the site:

Note: There is a trick to getting these matches to light easily without snapping them in two. Instead of drawing them to you, as you would with a normal match, you should strike them down onto the striker, as if trying to poke it through the top, with just a very little forward motion, not with a pulling motion you would normally use with a match. No, this is not intuitive, and no, there are no instructions on the vial to this effect.
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"Things that have never happened before happen all the time." — Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety