Tag Archives: blokus

PuzzleNation Product Review: Puzzometry

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In the past, I’ve reviewed a few products — Robot Turtles and The Maze of Games, for example — that were crowdfunded before reaching the open market, but today’s product is the first where I’ve completely observed the process from campaign launch to holding the product in my hands.

Today’s product review is Puzzometry, a jigsaw-style piece-placement puzzle with a serious challenge factor.

You’ve got 14 puzzle pieces to place into the frame pictured below, and there’s only one way to place every piece and complete the puzzle. Can you find it?

Created by Jim Fox, Puzzometry had a bit of a rocky road to realization. The initial Kickstarter campaign failed to meet its lofty goals, but Fox, who had remained totally honest and forthright with his backers from day one, reached out to his supporters and presented two possible options: either relaunch on Kickstarter with a lower funding goal or immediately shift all of his efforts to an e-commerce site.

In a close vote, the backers opted for another Kickstarter campaign, which was funded within an hour of launching! In fact, the second campaign was ten times more successful than the original campaign!

Puzzometry comes in three flavors:

  • Puzzometry, which has 14 pieces to fit into the frame
  • Puzzometry Jr., which is smaller and has only 7 pieces to fit into a smaller frame
  • Puzzometry Squares, which also has 14 pieces, but eschews the octagonal shape of many Puzzometry pieces for right angles and more Tetris-like shapes to fit into the frame

[A sampling of Puzzometry’s signature puzzle pieces.]

There’s only one solution that allows you to place every piece in the frame, and the difficulty is a credit to the game’s impressive design. The pieces are all interesting, interlocking in unexpected ways and challenging even savvy jigsaw solvers.

At this point, I’ve only solved Puzzometry Jr. and Puzzometry (I haven’t picked up a copy of Squares yet), and found them both to be great fun. Puzzometry Jr. will be an easy task for older solvers, but it’s a perfect fit for younger puzzlers to introduce them to puzzles beyond the jigsaw format.

Plus, Fox includes instructions for a two-player game called Puzzometry Keepout, which is similar to Blokus. Each player chooses pieces, as if they’re drafting players for a dodgeball team. Then, once all the pieces are allocated, the players take turns placing pieces in the frame. You take turns until someone can’t fit one of their remaining pieces into the frame.

All three versions of Puzzometry are now available on the Puzzometry website, so check them out. They’d make a fine addition to any puzzler’s library.

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Tile style puzzling!

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Tile puzzles and tile games have been with us for centuries, but I daresay they’ve never been as prominent in our game/puzzle culture as they are these days.

Let’s start with the basics: dominoes.

Chinese Dominoes, which are slightly longer than the regular ones pictured above (not to mention black with white pips), can be traced back to writings of the Song Dynasty, nearly a thousand years ago. Dominoes as we know them first appeared in Italy during the 1800s, and some historians theorize they were brought to Europe from China by traveling missionaries.

The most common form of playing dominoes — building long trains or layouts and trying to empty your hand of tiles before your opponent does — also forms the core gameplay of other tile-based games, like the colorful Qwirkle, a game that combines dominoes and Uno by encouraging you to create runs of the same shape or color.

A tile game with similarly murky origins is Mahjong, the Chinese tile game that plays more like a card game than a domino game. (Mahjong is commonly compared to Rummy for that very reason.)

Mahjong has been around for centuries, but there are several different origin stories for the game, one tracing back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), another to the days of Confucius (500 BC). The gameplay itself is about matching tiles (called melds) to build winning hands.

Rummikub, another tile game (but with numbers instead of characters on the tiles) also resembles card games in its gameplay, and anyone who has played Texas Rummy or Go Fish will instantly recognize the gameplay of building runs (1, 2, 3, 4 of the same color, for instance) and sets (three 1s of different colors, for instance).

All of these games employ pattern matching and chain thinking skills that are right in the puzzler’s wheelhouse, but some more modern tile games and puzzles challenge solvers in different ways.

The game Carcassonne is a world-building game wherein players add tiles to an ever-growing landscape, connecting roads and cities while placing followers on the map in order to gain points. Here, the tiles form just one part of a grander strategic puzzle, one encouraging deeper plotting and planning than some other tile games.

The Settlers of Catan also involves tile placement, but as more of a game starter, not as an integral part of the gameplay. Both Fluxx: The Board Game and The Stars Are Right employ tile shifting as a terrific puzzly wrinkle to their gameplay.

Our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles have a puzzle combining crosswords and tiles, Brick by Brick, which encourages the solver to place the “bricks” on the grid and fill in the answers.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the most popular electronic tile game in modern memory, Tetris.

Tetris — which turns 30 this year! — requires quick thinking, good spatial recognition, and an ability to plan ahead (especially for those elusive four-block pieces that can eliminate four rows at once!). There are plenty of puzzles that employ similar tiles — Blokus, tangrams, and pentominoes come to mind — but none that have engendered the loyalty of Tetris.

Last but not least, there are the sliding-tile puzzles. These puzzles take all the challenge of tile placement games like Dominoes and add a further complication: the tiles are locked into a frame, so you can only move one tile at a time.

Frequently called the Fifteen Puzzle because the goal is to shift all 15 numbered tiles until they read out in ascending order, sliding-tile puzzles are chain solving at its best. Whether you’re building a pattern or forming a picture (or even helping a car escape a traffic jam, as in ThinkFun’s Rush Hour sliding-tile game), you’re participating in a long history of tile-based puzzling that has spanned the centuries.

Heck, even the Rubik’s Cube is really a sliding-tile game played along six sides at once!

[Be sure to tune in on Thursday, when I explore tile-based word games like Scrabble!]

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