machai-umno

Lately I've been not only playing Stickets a lot, but also thinking about it as an example of a very well designed game. Just a few days ago, Raf Peeters was kind enough to share with me some insight about how puzzles which are enjoyable in physical form don't necessarily work as well when ported to a touch screen device. For example, a put-together puzzle like Roadblock becomes harder to play on iPhone because rotating the pieces, which is a natural motion when playing the physical version, becomes cumbersome and requires multiple taps. Stickets doesn't have the above problem, because it was born as a digital game. It avoids the difficulty of rotating the pieces, simply by not allowing to rotate them. Everything becomes more natural that way. The Press Kit on the developer's website lists some points about the philosophy of the game, which I quote: Less is more. Reason like a child. Stickets is about rhythms and patterns. While I haven't yet figured out the ...

Match 3 puzzle games are a dime a dozen on the App Store. I don't find them particularly interesting, and usually stay well clear of them. Stickets , however, is pretty darn good. It is highly original, exceptionally polished, and bloody hard. Stickets is the lastest game released by the Australian developer Wanderlands . One of their earlier creations is the brilliant Impasse , which is currently only available as a Flash game. Sadly, it is so good that it has been unofficially ported multiple times to iPhone, and I even reviewed one of those copycats a few weeks ago, not knowing that it wasn't an original game (don't look for that review now, I've removed it). But let's go back to Stickets. You play on a 5x5 board. It starts out nicely empty, but that won't last for long. At the bottom of the screen there are four L trominoes , each one using a random permutation of three colors. Every move consists of picking one of the tromionoes, and placing it in a free p...

Vaccine Case by Wataru Nakano is a puzzle game from Japan, based on truly brilliant mechanics and a perfectly fitting theme. I suggest turning off the music. Otherwise it might get stuck in your head for all day :-) The basic idea is this: you see the map of a lab. Some rooms contain viruses, other rooms contain antidote gas. When gas comes in contact with a virus of the same color, both disappear. The goal is to remove all viruses. To play the game, you control doors. The basic type of door can only be opened. When you open a door, gas spreads as far as it can go and cannot be stopped. The most useful doors can be both opened and closed. This is important because, since when you kill a virus the gas you used disappears as well, you often need to seal some gas into a closed room to reuse it later. The room at the top of this level has that kind of door. Another important limitation is that you cannot open a door if it separates two rooms containing gas of different colors. So in the ...

Qvoid is a wonderfully presented puzzle game by +Raimon Zamora . The care and polish that has been put into it is unbelievable. It was originally released in 2011, but has been updated several times and has now become free. You control a smiling cube. The cube rolls over the playing area, beautifully animated, and when it ends over a colored tile, it picks up that color on one of its faces. Interestingly, after you've picked up a color, your moves are limited because the colored face can only touch a tile of the same color. When that happens, both colors disappear. Match all tiles, and the puzzle is solved. You can pick up more than one color at a time, which will limit your movements even more. There's even an achievement to be earned if you can solve a puzzle picking up 6 colors at once. Puzzles that use a rolling solid for their mechanics often tend to have large levels which take too long to solve, simply because they are large, not because they are difficult. Qvoid doesn...

I'm usually suspicious of puzzle games that have "easy to learn and difficult to master" in their description, but Subaku by Eric Koziol is good despite that. I'm also totally bored by sudoku , but thankfully, despite the misleading icon and the suspiciously similar name, this is a completely different puzzle . If you are suspicious too, there's also a free version called subaku mini , which contains just the first 10 puzzles. The game is played on a 3x3 grid, containing some numbered tiles. when you tap a tile, its value is decreased by one, and its orthogonal neighbors are increased by one. So tapping the 4 above gives this: when a row, column, or diagonal contains three identical numbers, they are all removed. The goal is to clear the board. So tapping the 3 above would give this, and solve the puzzle: There are 100 puzzles included; the list is well presented with colorful thumbnails, and a target number of moves needed to solve the puzzle. Note that the targ...

Perplexagon  is an interesting free puzzle game for iPhone and iPad that you've never heard of. I downloaded it some time ago, and initially I didn't like it much, but it grew on me after getting used to the quirks of the user interface. Designed by Nathan Lindquist, a physics professor, Perplexagon is a sequential movement and color matching puzzle that revolves around polygons. Or the other way around... The playing area consists of two or more regular polygons, with a variable number of sides, connected to one another by a side. Each polygon is divided into colored triangles. To make a move, you touch a polygon and swipe. This causes it to swivel around a vertex until it touches another polygon. If the triangles that touched have the same color, they turn black. The goal is to make all triangles black. There's a total of 30 levels, which must be solved in order. Interestingly,  the "par" indicated by the game for each puzzle doesn't seem to be the optim...

The other day I stumbled by accident on Tile Drop , a nice free puzzle game for iPhone and iPad by Daniel Wood . The basic idea isn't new, and actually there's an interesting story behind. The mechanics of Tile Drop are the same of another game by the same author, Blockees . Blockees itself was a remake of Blockee by Rob Gibson. Both games are no longer available on the App Store. Blockee was inspired by Eliminator by Riza Purwo Nugroho , which brings us to Jakarta, Indonesia , back in 2002 at least. This new incarnation of the game is a beautiful implementation, featuring an excellent minimalistic interface, possibly inspired by Letterpress - Word Game . Static images wouldn't do it justice so I invite you to take a look at the promo video: As you can see the rules are simple. There's a 5x5 board containing some colored tiles. When you swipe the screen, all tiles move in that direction until they hit the side of the screen or another tile. Black tiles don't m...