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!

• This may be a little late thematically, but the puzzle is still fun.  Blaine’s Puzzle Blog has a leap day puzzle.
• A while back, I tried to mix puzzles with poker.  I just recently discovered that Puzzle Monster has a casino puzzle section.  Its latest addition is primes.
• Passion for Puzzles posted about a flash game called BrickS.  It’s a little bit of a twist on an ubiquitous puzzle style.  The goal is to match three bricks of any color to collect them.  The difference in this game is that a brick will change color when you click it to the color of an adjacent brick that the arrow inside the brick is pointing to.

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.

Last year, Google teamed up with Columbia Pictures to promote The Da Vinci Code with an online puzzle game.  This year, Google has teamed up with Universal Pictures to promote the new movie The Bourne Ultimatum, with an online puzzle game called The Ultimate Search for Bourne.

For the game, you take on the role of an agent trying to find Jason Bourne.  You do this with the help of tools provided by Google.  The game has you searching fake web sites for information on surveillance agents and the like.  Successfully playing the game each day allows you to place surveillance cameras in different locations with the hope of spotting Bourne on one of them.

The prizes for the game are similar to last years prizes for the Da Vinci Code Challenge.  They include, cash, a car, and trips to the major cities featured in the movies.  There are also additional daily prizes of $1000 gift cards.  And a special sightings prize of an iPhone for which anyone with over 25 sightings of Bourne is eligible.  The prizes this year are given out in sweepstakes fashion, so it’s really all luck whether or not you win.

The game has been only running a few days, and the challenges so far have not been terribly challenging, though there are some very interesting tools on the game display that have not yet been used.  All in all, a little less puzzley than last years game, but still worth a look.

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.

Through the Wired blog Geekdad, I came across the web site for Kadon Enterprises. Kadon apparently owns the trademark on the term “gamepuzzle.” Their products are games that can be played competitively by multiple players. Or by a single player in a form that more resembles solving a puzzle. The blog post talks a little about the lasers used to make the puzzles. If you like pentominoes, this is probably a good site to check out. Pentominoes seem to be a major feature of a number of their games.

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.

There’s another “grow” game today on Jay Is Games. The game is called NOBuzzle tree and it’s a trial and error puzzle game somewhat like those on EyezMaze. You are given a leafless, fruitless tree and a number of options to grow on the tree beneath it. The goal is to grow the items in the correct order, but there are no initial clues as to how to do this. You must actually try growing leaves and fruits to see what happens. The key is that whenever you grow a new leaf, any leaves or fruits that you’ve already grown and rightly come before the new leaf, will also grow an addition leaf. Sound complicated? It’s not really and once you begin playing around with it, you’ll immediately figure out how it works.

Jay Is Games is having a flash game design competition for which all of the entries must have a “grow” theme. The first entry in the competition is a puzzle game called Rings and Sticks, and it’s very good. The gameplay is unlike other games that I’ve seen before. You begin with a collection of rings scattered about the screen and a stick growing up from the middle. Along the bottom, there are a series of growing options. Either grow the stick, fork the stick, fork the stick slightly wider, grow the left branch, or grow the right branch. For each level, you have a limited number of each option that you can use. The goal is to grow the stick through each of the rings.

As the levels advance, the growth patterns become more complicated. Barriers begin to appear that your stick must grow around. There are also seeds that can begin a new stick growth. It’s not long before the levels begin to get really challenging.

All in all, it’s a great first entry. I’ll be interested to see if any other entries are as good.