IQ Circuits Puzzle Game

This IQ-puzzle I designed for SmartGames is a “golden” edition. It’s the 10th IQ-puzzle I developed. And it’s about 10 years ago I started creating the first one (IQ-Twist). But this game is  also special for another reason. Although all games in this IQ subbrand are 2D packing problems, this is the first which is also a connection game.  And to differentiate this game even more, we made it black with the paths in gold.

 

 

 

CAN YOU CONNECT THE DOTS?

 

From the start the idea was to do something with connections, like Anaconda. The inspiration was clearly PCB’s (printed circuit boards) you typically find inside a computer. The problem to make a connection game work on such a small game board, is that it is very restricted. Each puzzle piece must fit on the game board AND should also have the right connections to adjacent puzzle pieces. But at the same time dead ends or paths that are not connected to a dot are not allowed.

 

 

 

So it took a lot of time to find a set of puzzle piece that made this possible. To allow for enough different packings, this game includes 10 rather simple puzzle pieces, made of only 2, 3 or 4 cubes. Most pieces are double sided, so they have different options on top and bottom side. But the 4 rectangular piece can also be used on their sides, and thus have a third option. These sides are empty, so they are ideal to fill up part of the game board where you don’t need any connections. This resulted in 179 different packings, which was nearly enough to create 120 challenges because some packings look very similar.