Tag: Games

A couple of weeks ago, Graham recommended a few game sites to me. It didn’t take long to get tired of Beeboxing, but solving GrowCube, the first game on EyesMaze, took much longer than I would have thought. After a few minutes of clicking the pieces in various orders, it became clear that there was a specific set of rules involved with each piece and one only had to had to figure out the rules. Since there were a finite (although large) number of playing combinations, I set about recording the results for several games:

Click to enlarge

As you can tell from my copious notes, I designated the pieces on left (top to bottom) as “bone”, “water”, “ball”, “bowl” and “seeds”. The pieces on the right I called “pot” (and sometimes “bucket”), “tube”, “spring”, “people” and “fire”. I tried the pieces in different orders and recorded the actions that occurred after each play. With these results, I was able to generate a set of rules that I could test. These were the initial rules that I noted:

• People have 6 tasks
• People cannot do more than 1 task per turn
• Canal must follow well
• Steps must follow canal
• Steps/bridge must follow steps
• Cave must follow steps/bridge
• Lighting cave must follow cave
• Seeds will not grow without water
• Tube must be placed after seeds
• Fire will level up 4 turns after placement
• Fire cannot level up before pot is moved

At this point it became obvious that a long set of rules would not provide all of the information about relationships and dependencies that I needed, especially when it came to describing the changes that each object went through with each turn. So I decided to document these changes for some of the objects and try to establish rules based on those changes. I started with the most complicated objects (those requiring the most changes to reach “MAX”):

Pot life-cycle:                    Place Embiggen Embiggen (next turn) Moved (after fire played, 2 people) Plant added Fruit added ??	Seeds life-cycle:                    Place Grow (one turn after canal is dug) Grow (next turn) Grow (next turn) Grow (next turn) Grow (next turn) Seeds (next turn) Fruit (next turn) MAX
Tube life-cycle:                  Place on seeds 180 turn (next turn) Extend to back (next turn) pot hole must be available seeds must be level 6 Around corner (next turn) Through and up ??	Bowl life-cycle:                   Place Tower (next turn) Plants (next turn) Bubbles (next turn) MAX Bone life-cycle: Place Skull Horns ??
Water life-cycle:                    Place Lake (dug by people) Canal (dug by people) Down steps (dug by people) ??	People life-cycle:

In addition, I also observed that the pieces activated during each turn in this order:

1. seeds
2. tube
3. bone
4. bowl
5. pot
6. people (activate water, fire, spring, ball)

Given all that, I established the following as my base play order:

1. people
2. water
3. seeds
4. tube
5. pot
6. fire
7. bone
8. bowl
9. spring
10. ball

After a little experimentation, I finally figured it out today (spoiler follows):
Continue reading “Beating GrowCube”