Imangi is a new word puzzle game for the iPhone.  At its most basic level, the game involves finding words in a grid, however in Imangi you have the option of altering the grid by rotating the letters in individual rows and columns.  The idea is to maximize your score.

Imangi Studios is interested in getting feedback on the game from puzzle lovers.  So drop in and let them know what you think.

Migration is a flash maze game that I came across recently.  The object is to move a herd of gnus to an oasis across a field of varied terrain.  Each of the terrain types represents a season and the trick is that a gnu can only move into a terrain type during the correct season.  Each time the gnu moves, the season progresses.  It’s a simple maze.

It gets a bit more challenging at the 10th level when you have to control more than one gnu.  Now you can move either gnu as you choose and moving either will advance the season for both.

Enjoy!

WordConnect is a little puzzle game that is a little bit like Tetris with letters. Letters fall from the top of the screen and your goal is to arrange them into words. When words are formed, the letters are removed from the board. You continue to play until you can create all of the words from a given list and then you go to the next level with a new list.

It’s an interesting game and the letters fall in an order that is intended to help you, which is good because it might be too hard otherwise. There are currently only two levels, but the creators of the game seem very willing to improve it and they are asking for feedback on the site.

I always love it when a new Eyezmaze game comes out.  The latest is Grow Island and I found out about it through Passion For Puzzles.  Personally, I found this one trickier than the other grow games, even though it has pretty much the same gameplay.  All grow games provide you with a set of options that you must choose in the correct order to successfully complete the game.  The games all have different settings and different options to choose from.  In Grow Island, the setting is a deserted island and you have eight different technologies to choose from.  Obviously, the order in which you choose the technologies has a huge impact on how the civilization on your island develops.  And, as always, wrong orders can result in entertaining outcomes also.

I did some googling around and discovered that there are actually two possible (and very different) endings to the game.  So, if you find one, keep searching until you find the others.

Over a year ago, I posted an article that mentioned a little flash adventure puzzle game called Warbears.  I’ve recently discovered that there’s an entire site dedicated to Warbears–with a second mission and a thrid coming soon.  There also seems to be an entire Warbears world called Bedtime City that players can join.  There are some standard MMO features like earning credits, buying an apartment, and furnishing it.  It seems like a mini Puzzle Pirates.

Hoshi Saga is a little flash game where there is little instruction.  “The game is to discover a star covered in a stage.”  That’s all you get.

It’s a game of trial and discovery.  Your clicks will do something different in each stage.  And, yes, there is always a star to be found.  The stages are all given a rating, and a general rule of thumb seems to be that the higher the rating, the more difficult the stage.

Since this past weekend, there’s been a lot of buzz about a trailer for a movie codenamed Cloverfield (the real name is, as yet, unknown.)  The movie is being produced by J. J. Abrams, who is known for creating the TV series Lost, and the screenplay was written by Drew Goddard, who was a writer for Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Many sites are posting about this.  Here’s one that provides only the basic information, and here’s one that goes into a little bit more depth.  There appears to be an Alternate Reality Game in motion to build up hype around the movie.  Currently, the game involves two sites ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com and ethanhaaswasright.com.  The latter is where you’ll find the puzzles.  So, check it out and have some fun.

ARGNet is reporting a new alternate reality game called Alice is Lost.  The game is created as a side project by Eric Harshbarger, who is a puzzle designer at Mind Candy Design, and will be starting this fall.  As the article reports, the game will be heavily puzzle based.

A couple years ago (before I started this blog), I came across a game called Professor Fizzwizzle.  It’s a fun little platform puzzle game where you lead the Professor himself–having him push crates, ride barrels, and zap the bad guys–to a transporter that will take you to the next level.  As a bonus, the game runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Recently, a sequel called Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery came out.  It’svery similar to the original, and that’s a good thing.  You can download the demo game for free and this allows you to play the first 10 levels or so.  To play all of the levels, you have to buy the game.  It’s worth a look at the demo for both games.  They’re really quite well done.

Here’s an interesting new flash game called Plupon.  In Plupon, digits fall down the screen inside little bubbles.  Your goal is to combine 3 of the digits so that they sum to a multiple of 10 (in this case, only 0, 10, or 20.)  You advance to the next level when you’ve made enough of these combinations; the exact number varies by level.  A bar on the bar on the bottom keeps track of your “health.”  This bar shortens whenever a digit reached the bottom, with the larger digits having a greater penalty than the smaller ones.  It also shortens when you create a sum greater than 10 that is not a multiple of ten.  Here, the greater the modulus, the larger the penalty (i.e. 19 is worse than 11.)

As the levels go up, the bubbles come down faster.  It also appears that the frequency with which certain digits appear varies from level to level.

I recently came across a site featuring Sudoku-Ball. The Sudoku-Ball takes overlapping sudoku puzzles to a new level. The idea is that the overlapping puzzles are layed out on the surface of a sphere so that they eventually the chain will wrap back around to the same puzzle again.

The site makes the game available as a Java applet, but it’s not easy to use. There are multiple steps before you can actually play the game. Still, it’s worth a look.

Blocky is a flash puzzle game that is, in some ways reminiscent of the Same Game, but requires a very different kind of logic.  You are presented with a grid of blocks of different colors (that also happen to have faces.)  The goal of each round is to clear away all of the faces.  You do that by selecting rectangles in which all four corner blocks have the same color.  The selected blocks are cleared and replaced with new blocks of different colors without faces.  Of course, given enough time, you’d always be able to clear every level.  But, there’s a time limit.  And the more blocks that are cleared in a single rectangle, the more points that you get.  As you advance, more colors are added and the grids become larger.  It makes me wonder if this game is derived from a pencil and paper puzzle.  Certainly, it would be easy to create one from it.

Laser Logic is a nice little flash game where you use mirrors to redirect lasers to targets. Of course, there are often multiple lasers of multiple colors. Targets must be hit by the correct laser color or the correct combination of laser colors. And there are only a limited number of mirrors available for use. The levels get harder as you go on, and the game will remember your progress if you return again. There are no flashy graphics in this game, but I often enjoy simpler games like this one.

Update:

Tablesaw points out in the comments that this game is a direct copy of a game called Chromaton.  On the site, you can find a free download for Windows and Mac OS X.

I’ve posted recently about two of the games in the Casual Gameplay Design Competition at Jay Is Games, but now submissions are closed, and I can express general thoughts on all of the games.

• Rings and Sticks - Read my post here.
• Gateway II - A standard click-adventure and a sequel to the original Gateway game.  Lead a robot through rooms and interact with objects in order to achieve a goal that’s not apparent at first.
• Planned - An interesting puzzle game.  To solve you need to click on a series of diamonds so that they all touch each other.  When you click on a diamond it grows, but you can’t click on the same diamond twice in a row nor can you click on a diamond that’s already touching another diamond.
• NoBuzzle Tree - See my post here.
• Grow Word - A standard cryptogram puzzle that requires you to solve it one letter at a time.  It’s actually not the best interface for solving a cryptogram and you may find yourself looking for a pencil and paper to solve it by traditional means.
• Orbit - This is a simple puzzle game where the goal isn’t clear at first.  There are several orbiting planets and clicking on them makes them split off into other orbits.  There is, of course, more to discover but that’s part of the fun.
• Tower of Babblers - Again, the puzzle here is to figure out what the goal is.  And, honestly, after I had figured that out, I found the game slightly annoying.
• Sprout - This is a cute game about a seed that wants to learn how to be an acorn.  In the game, the seed can learn to be the seed for any tree that it is near.  It then decides what tree it wants to be, grows, and bears another tree.  And, of course, different things happen based on what type of tree you grow.
• Frog and Vine - This game is actually four different puzzles built around a theme of frogs and vines.
• Grow the Robot - A game to test your knowledge of boolean logic operators.  It also tests how well you can follow really complicated circuit diagrams.
• enQBate - This is a touch-every-square puzzle game (or touch-every-hex, as the case may be.)  Nothing too revolutionary here.  There are teleports.  And some of the puzzles require you to hit the same square twice.
• Chicken Grow - This game is actually two puzzles.  One is a sliding block puzzle.  The other involves water running through pipes.
• Jelly Fusion - This puzzle game is fairly unique.  It requires you to move little jelly creatures with eyeballs around the board.  You do this be combining them (and thus creating larger jelly creatures with multiple eyeballs) and separating them.  There are also move limits and limits on how large you can make your jelly creatures that vary from game to game.
• Growbal Warming - The goal is to save islanders from rising floods due to global warming.  Also, oddly, you have super powers and can get new ones as the game progresses.  The problem is that if you don’t pick the right power, there’s almost no way to pass the next level.  Which is slightly annoying.

Tomorrow marks the start of Perplex City Season 2.  The Perplex City web site has already undergone some changes in preparation.  The new site is really nice and it’s definitely become a great site for puzzle lovers.  The most notable difference is that there’s now a large collection of puzzles that can be solved online without having to buy cards.  The plan is to allow site members to create puzzles to add to the collection, but that has yet to be implemented.

As of tomorrow, Season 2 puzzle cards will be available.  There will be 256 cards again, this time in three waves.  There will also be a couple puzzles written by me (though none in wave 1), so keep an eye out.

The alternate reality portion of the game is being called Perplex City Stories now, and that should be back in April.  Presumably with another big prize to be won.