Tag Archives: Risk

How People Used Puzzles and Games to Endure the Pandemic

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Puzzles and games have been there for many people during the pandemic.

Many puzzle and game companies offered (and continue to offer) “COVID discounts” and giveaways to help people financially impacted by the crisis. Companies released free online or zoom-compatible versions of their products to help people get by.

There are all sorts of articles out there about how Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games have served as critical socializing tools in virtual hangouts. Bar-style trivia, zoom games, Jackbox, Board Game Arena, Fall Guys, Among Us… lots of communal activities went virtual as puzzles and games filled a rapidly growing niche.

Whether solved alone or with other members of the household, jigsaw puzzles sales increased 500% or more. Online sites to coordinate trades sprang up, allowing people to swap puzzles they’d solved before for ones new to them.

At a terrible time for many people, puzzles and games helped us cope.

And honestly, if you know the history of games and puzzles, it makes sense. Many of them have been born out of unpleasant circumstances.

Monopoly was a hit during the Great Depression, offering an escape and the illusory feeling of being rich. The game itself only cost two dollars, so it was a solid investment with a ton of replay value.

Candy Land was created to entertain children with polio (although that fact wasn’t commonly known for 50 years). Clue was designed during air raid drills as a way to pass the time. The Checkered Game of Life (later The Game of Life) was inspired by Milton Bradley’s own wild swing of business misfortune.

Risk and other conflict-heavy games weren’t popular in postwar Germany, so an entire genre of games that avoided direct conflict was born: Eurogames.

It’s just as true in the modern day. What game was flying off the shelves during COVID-19 lockdowns? Pandemic.

That combination of escapism and social interaction is so powerful. Games are low-stakes. They offer both randomness (a break from monotony) and a degree of control (something sorely missing during lockdown).

Puzzles too assisted folks in maintaining their mental health. And isn’t it interesting that crossword solving, something viewed by many as a solitary endeavor — I guess they never needed to ask someone else 5-Down — helped fill a crucial social role for people?

Constructors stepped up in interesting, inventive ways. The sense of community fostered by online crossword events like Crossword Tournament From Your Couch (which filled the void of ACPT in 2020) and the Boswords Themeless League was absolutely invaluable to puzzlers who couldn’t attend some of the highlights of the puzzle calendar year.

As I said before, there are numerous articles out there celebrating the benefits of roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and more.

Roleplaying games certainly helped keep me sane during lockdown. It might sound ridiculous, but dealing with world-threatening threats, fiercely dangerous monsters, and sinister plots that I could DO something about was medicinal. It was escape in its truest form. It recharged me, allowing me to lose myself in storytelling with friends.

The last 18 months were hard. There may be hard months ahead. But I’m grateful for the puzzle/game community — and the many marvelous pastimes they’ve created — for helping me and many others get by. To smile. To cope. To socialize. And to enjoy.

What games and puzzles have helped you deal with unpleasant circumstances, fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you.

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Have you checked out our special summer deals yet? You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

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PuzzleNation Product Review: Thinking Putty Puzzle

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[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review. Due diligence, full disclosure, and all that. Yada yada disclaimer.]

ThinkFun has been pushing the envelope for years when it comes to logic puzzles. Whether we’re talking lasers, electrical circuits, colors, shadows, or gravity, they continue to find innovative ways to test the puzzly skills of their customers.

And the subject of today’s review is no exception. It takes a very simple idea — connecting colored dots on a grid — and adds a tactile, intriguing twist.

Let’s take a closer look at their newest offering, Thinking Putty Puzzle.

In Thinking Putty Puzzle, the solver has to connect the colored dots to their matching counterparts on the grid. They do so by bending, stretching, and shaping packets of putty into lines that connect the dots.

But those paths cannot cross. That would be too easy. Instead, the solver must map out how to connect the dots without crossing.

(There are bridge pieces that allow the putty paths to pass over or under each other, but otherwise, the paths cannot interact.)

And so, a simple connect-the-dots game becomes an engaging puzzle that involves careful planning and use of the grid space.

It looks like a lot of available space, but it fills up faster than you’d think with six paths to draw.

As you can see, the puzzle consists of a playing grid (which doubles as storage for the game and the putties), six colors of Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty (including a ThinkFun exclusive Binary Blue color), three bridge pieces, three blocking pieces (representing obstacles to be circumvented), and the 60 challenge cards.

The Challenge Cards increase in difficulty as you work your way through the deck. Beginner and Intermediate Challenges give way later to Advanced and Expert puzzles that will have you wracking your brain to twist, turn, and maneuver your six putty paths around the playing grid.

Each Challenge Card tells you where to place the colored dots to connect, as well as any bridge or blocking pieces are part of the grid.

From there, it’s all up to you. How do you proceed with 12 points to connect?

Maybe you start by connecting the nearest ones in order to figure out how to best use the remaining space.

Or perhaps you work out which dots will need to use the outermost paths and place those, so that the interior remains open for trickier maneuvering.

It’s easy to pull the putty until it’s stringy, which makes it harder to manipulate. Instead, I found it worked best to pull quickly and forcefully, almost suddenly, rather than gradually. It makes quite a satisfying SNAP sound when you’ve done it right, and there’s no stringy mess to clean up.

Also, be careful to avoid letting the various colors touch. The putty happily sticks to itself, so any pieces that intermingle are VERY difficult to separate.

That being said, the putty doesn’t adhere at all to the playing area, making the set up for the next puzzle — or clean up when you’re done puzzling — easy as could be.

(I, for one, was grateful that the sparkles in the Binary Blue didn’t rub off. When I first saw the glitter, it gave me Christmas card flashbacks.)

In terms of the actual puzzle-solving, strategy plays a bigger role here than you might expect. Honestly, it’s more like playing Risk or Chess than your solving usual logic puzzle.

For instance, once you’ve placed the red path in our example, your eyes naturally turn to the upper left corner, where green, orange, and yellow dots await. You need to place the green path in such a way that it doesn’t block or cut off access to the yellow or orange dots.

By thinking about the spaces needed to get in or out of those dots, it helps you eliminate bad paths to take, because in this puzzle, knowing where your path SHOULDN’T be is just as valuable as knowing where it should be.

Thinking Putty Puzzle takes the satisfaction of jigsaws and other physical puzzles to another level. While placing a jigsaw puzzle piece is cool, it’s not as cool as kneading the colored putty into a new path and tracing it onto the grid as part of your solve.

I expected to get a little bored with it after a while, but I didn’t. Watching the grid fill up with completed paths and seeing the puzzle come together never got old. On the contrary, the escalating difficulty made it all the more fulfilling to conquer each card and squish the putty back into a single lump while I prepped the next Challenge Card.

So, if you’re looking for a fun and accessible way to get younger solvers into puzzles — or you just prefer your logic puzzles to be more hands-on than the usual pencil-and-paper variety — then you’re sure to enjoy Thinking Putty Puzzle.

[Thinking Putty Puzzle is available from ThinkFun and other participating retailers.]

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Kickstarter Roundup!

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Oh yes, it’s that time again.

For years now, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been hotbeds of innovative puzzle and game design, and I’m always happy to spread the word about worthy projects that I think will delight and intrigue my fellow PuzzleNationers.

So let’s take a look at some projects that are currently seeking funding and see if any pique your interest!

The first is Peter Gordon’s Fireball Newsflash Crosswords.

Culturally timely clues and entries are a hallmark of this marvelous variation on Gordon’s long-running Fireball Crosswords brand, and you can be guaranteed that each Fireball Newsflash Crossword grid will be well-constructed and cleverly clued.

With twenty puzzles sent to you by email — one every two to three weeks — you’ll always have some terrific puzzling to look forward to.

Gordon has a knack for melding flowing grid design with sharp, topical entry words, and much of the time, you’ll not only be impressed by how much material makes it into the grid, but by what major and minor events you’ve missed recently! Gordon’s history of topnotch puzzles is all the incentive you need to contribute.

He’s already at one-third of his target goal, and he only launched a few days ago. I suspect Peter’s got another successful project on his hands here.

For the roleplaying-game enthusiasts out there, our second offering is right up your alley: Treacherous Traps.

Designed for the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons — but easily adapted for all sorts of other RPG systems — Treacherous Traps offers obstacles and surprises for players of any experience level.

Whether you’re selecting one of the specially tailored decks or the hardcover book containing all 250(!) traps, you’re sure to find plenty of devious ammunition to toss at your players.

Treacherous Traps has blown way past its original goal, but there’s still plenty of time to get in on the ground floor of some fun and crafty additions to any roleplaying campaign.

For our third and final offering today, we’ve got a new board game with ancient ties.

Enso Koi is a strategy game where each player tries to capture their opponents’ koi fish while protecting their own. As players navigate the pond, seize and maneuver stones, and eliminate the rival fish, they’ll have to devise tactics while playing both offense and defense.

A mix of piece-capturing games like chess and territory-control games like Risk, Enso Koi offers an elegant new take on classic board game tropes.

It’s about a third of the way funded already, and for a first-timer on Kickstarter, that’s pretty impressive!

Have any of these games hooked you? Let us know which ones you’re supporting in the comments section below! And if there are any campaigns you’re supporting that we missed, let us know!

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PuzzleNation Product Review: Constellations

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Plenty of games offer ambitious goals for the players to achieve. You become a real estate tycoon in Monopoly, a castle owner in Castellan, and a time-traveling adventurer in U.S. Patent Number 1. You could traverse the country in The Oregon Trail, save the world in Pandemic, or conquer it in Risk. That’s part of the magic of games.

But what if you could build the night sky? What if you could harness the stars themselves, assemble constellations, and place them into the heavens above?

Now that is a puzzly endeavor worthy of your attention. And that’s the concept behind the game in today’s product review. We’ll be trying out Constellations by Xtronaut Enterprises.

Constellations combines the resource management card game mechanics of Just Desserts with the pattern-matching tile play of Carcassonne to create an educational and engaging play experience.

Each player starts with five star cards. Each star card represents a different type of star (or in some cases, two of that type of star). The star cards are used to assemble various constellations in order to score points.

The game begins with one constellation already placed in the sky, as well as three possible constellations to build. Players may reserve one of the three constellations, making it their primary goal and removing it from play for the other players.

As you can see in the picture above, different constellations require different combinations of star cards. Some constellations are simpler, so they’re worth fewer points. Other constellations have higher values, but more complex combinations of star cards, which may be harder or more time-consuming to collect.

[One constellation tile, plus the star cards played to complete it. As you can see, you can use extra stars as needed (like a Two B-Type Stars card above), as well as using O cards as wild cards (as I did for the two A-type stars needed to complete this constellation.]

Once a player has gathered all of the star cards necessary to complete the constellation, they then must play it in the night sky, placing it adjacent to one or more of the constellations already completed.

You score points by placing a constellation so that the gemstones along the edges match the neighboring constellation(s), and there are additional points available for placing constellations beside other constellations (as they would appear in the actual night sky). For instance, Leo Minor offers a two-point bonus when placed next to either Leo or Lynx.

Different arrangements of gemstones around the edges of the constellation tile require you to be crafty when and where you place your tile, since more matching gemstones means more points.

[In this layout, Taurus was added perfectly, matching gemstones with both Perseus and Ophiuchus. Pegasus, on the other hand, matched Perseus nicely, but only matched one gemstone with Orion.]

Unfortunately, you have to play a completed constellation, and sometimes the gemstone patterns don’t match up at all. If that’s the case, you’ll lose two points for a constellation played out of place. (Once again, the closer you get to placing your constellation as it would actually appear in the night sky, the better it is for your game.)

All of the game’s mechanics are designed around actual science, which is a very cool touch. The star cards include “Did You Know?” facts about each type of star, and the instruction booklet also includes a short guide to stargazing, star classification, and little write-ups for each constellation included in the game. (There’s even a criss-cross-style crossword on the back page!)

Constellations is great fun, requiring strategy, timing, and puzzly observational skills in order to effectively play the game. The educational aspect doesn’t detract from the gameplay at all, and the alternate rules offered in the back (as well as rules for shorter and longer gameplay times) offer an impressive amount of replay value.

All in all, Constellations mixes card games and tile games with ease, and it makes for a fun and mellow gameplay experience.

[Constellations is available from Xtronaut Enterprises and other select retailers.]

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PuzzleNation Product Review: Deblockle

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[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review. Due diligence, full disclosure, and all that.]

Chess, checkers, backgammon, Go, Othello… all of the classic board games rely upon the idea that both players know how the pieces can and will move from round to round. That way, they can strategize, they can prepare defenses, they can circumnavigate your attempts to flummox them. To outmaneuver someone, you have to know how they can maneuver.

But what if your opponent could potentially move in five different ways? How would that alter your strategy? How would that alter your gameplay?

Beware, fellow puzzlers… one-on-one board gaming just got a little more complicated with Deblockle.

Masterminded by the team at Project Genius, Deblockle pits two players head to head to see who can remove their four blocks from the board first.

That’s right, there aren’t sixteen pieces to keep track of, like in chess, or twelve, like in checkers. There are just four blocks for you, and four blocks for your opponent.

But here’s where things get tricky. Each turn, you have two moves. The first move is to roll one of your blocks into an adjacent space (either vertically or horizontally).

The second move is to place your block according to whichever symbol that landed face-up because of that roll.

There are six symbols, each with a corresponding action:

  • Stop: your turn is over, there is no second move
  • Cross: move your block one space either horizontally or vertically
  • X: move your block one space diagonally
  • Hoops: move your block three spaces (vertically or horizontally) in any combination, including backtracking over a space you just occupied
  • Slider: move your block either vertically or horizontally until you reach the end of the row or column, or until you’re stopped by another block

With each of those second moves, you’re not rolling the block to reveal a new symbol; you’re picking it up and placing it into its new position.

And yes, there are six symbols, and I only listed five above. That’s because the sixth symbol, the star, can only be revealed if you’re rolling onto one of the star spaces on the board. By rolling the block star-side-up onto a star space, you remove the block from play.

That’s the only time you can roll your block star-side-up, and the only time you’re allowed to occupy a star space with your block.

There are only two star spaces on the board, and you can only remove your blocks from the game if you utilize the star space opposite you.

And that’s when things get really tricky. Because it’s entirely likely that your opponent’s blocks will prevent you from rolling onto the symbol you wanted. So you’re puzzling out how exactly to roll and move your blocks so you’ll end up adjacent to the star space with the star symbol waiting to be rolled face-up, and also playing defense to impede your opponent’s efforts to navigate and manipulate the board to their own advantage.

It’s a lot to keep track of, and it makes for an immensely engrossing, engaging puzzle duel for two players. You’ve got the resource management of Risk, the piece placement mechanics of chess, and the defensive gameplay of Stratego and other strategy games.

And since the blocks are placed in their starting positions by your opponent — after rolling them randomly to see which symbol is face-up to start — every game of Deblockle is different. Opening gambits — like those you can learn in chess — are useless, because you won’t know how you can move your blocks initially until your opponent places them.

There is a wonderfully fresh challenge factor to Deblockle that many other head-to-head board games lack. While playing the game over and over will allow you to develop techniques and skills for how to better move your blocks, there are no shortcuts to becoming a better player through sheer repetition, because each opening setup is different.

Project Genius has managed to stuff a massive amount of gameplay, strategy, and style into those four little blocks, and they’ve got a real winner on their hands here.

[Deblockle is available from Project Genius and other participating retailers, for players starting at 8 and up!]

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PuzzleNation Review: Pyramid Arcade

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Today’s review is going to be a little bit different, because I’m not reviewing a game… I’m reviewing 22 of them in one fell swoop.

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That’s right, Pyramid Arcade represents the latest evolution in the Looney Pyramids series of puzzle games, combining and refining years of Looney Labs games and innovations into one sleek package. You see, when Andrew Looney started the Looney Pyramids series of games, his goal was to develop a puzzle game as infinitely adaptable as a deck of playing cards.

Pyramid Arcade is the next step in that process, amassing 22 games — some previously released, some new — in one massive rulebook. And everything you need to play is included, from game boards and dice to sets of pyramids in ten different colors.

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[Two piece-placement games, Pharaoh and Petal Battle. Pharaoh is built around controlling the center square and the neighboring squares, while Petal Battle is about controlling five adjacent petals.]

Honestly, there’s a game in here for every type of puzzler. There are one-player games as well as games for 2-6 players, and even games for 10 players. There are combat games, collaborative games, wagering games, games of chance, balance games, and more. Some games require all 90 pyramids in the set!

And although some of the games are a little abstract — I’m still wrapping my head around Martian Chess — sitting down and actually playing through all the different options brings even the abstract concepts down to earth. You might be playing an insect in one game or a germ in another, but traditional puzzle skills and board-game styles rule the day here.

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View post on imgur.com

[Two strategy games, the Risk-inspired World War 5 and the miniature chess game Hijinks, which we previously reviewed as the standalone game Pink Hijinks.]

Stacking games like Hijinks are where the Looney Pyramids really shine as puzzle games. Being able to move beyond the two-dimensional play that defines so many board games adds a great deal of strategy and style to the gameplay. Whether you’re building rockets in Launchpad 23 or Jenga-like towers in Verticality, the pyramids become more than simple game pieces.

Although the price tag is higher than the usual board game or puzzle game fare, Pyramid Arcade is worth it. Not only do you get over twenty different games, but the rulebook includes a history of Looney Pyramids products, challenges for you to make your own Looney Pyramids games, and teasers for 22 additional games created by fans and submitted to Looney Labs online.

It’s impressive, all that you can accomplish with these curious little pyramids.

[Pyramid Arcade is available from Looney Labs and featured in our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide!]

And thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!