Figure Ground is a unique new puzzle game from Ian Gilman. The concept is simple, moved colored blocks around on the right to match an image on the left. There are a couple catches though. When blocks of the same color are laid next to each other, they are permanently attached. Also, moving blocks of one color reveal blocks of a different color beneath.
Playful Planet Games is creating an iPhone version of their word puzzle game Konstroo. Currently they are looking for puzzle enthusiasts who would like to beta test the iPhone version. They only have limitted spots so, if you’re interested, make sure to sign up soon.
Z-Rox is a new puzzle game being promoted by SmartKit. The game asks you to identify a given letter, number, shape, or symbol but all it shows you is a single line cross-section as it moves from top to bottom–like a copying machine. In order to not make it too easy, the line always stays in the same place. There seems to be 100 different puzzles currently for the game. I haven’t gotten through them all, but when I got to 50, the game told me I was half way there. Enjoy!
The tag line for Foldit is “Solve Puzzles for Science.” It’s a protein folding game and the results of the game being played by people around the internet will be used for scientific research. The idea is that a large number of people playing a game can perform some tasks better than computers. Does that really work? From what I can tell, that is the question. The focus of the research right now seems to be proving that this works.
So, how is the game? When you play, you get dropped into protein folding without much introduction. It’s not entirely clear, to start, what the goal is or what your tactics should be. As you play and experiment, the goals become more clear: avoid collisions, create hydrogen bonds, eliminate voids. I also was able to develop a little bit of strategy but the only tools that I seemed to have available were pulling on the protein chain and wiggling the backbone. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing, but I managed to get progressively better scores.
In all, it’s worth a look. And if anyone can explain the game to me a little more, that would be great.
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.
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