Puzzle Craft

I don't normally think of my iOS games as blog worthy, because I tend to write them off as simple. Sometimes simple is good. Puzzle Craft is a game about building a kingdom, growing it from a small camp to a large village. To gather resources to help construct the kingdom you play a connect 3+ style puzzle game. The game rewards you with resources to help upgrade your kingdom and make your ability to play the puzzle more efficient. This creates a pleasant feedback loop where the better you do the better you can do. More advanced resources are unlocked by getting longer sets of the simpler ones, they appear in the field so efficient clears can lead to more of an advanced resource. Once a resource has been unlocked the combo required to gather a crafting unit of it can be reduced. Buildings can be made to increase the frequency of a resource and reduce the code of gathering it. On top of this you receive, from buildings you place and can craft (using the resources you gather), tools to help clear a resource of some type from the board. This helps remove lone squares and clear out more common tiles.

To add some challenge there are two resource gathering areas; one is a farm, with food and wood, and the other is a mine with stone, metals and gems. The food is used as supplies to buy time in the mine with more advanced resources providing more turns. The farm costs gold to work which can be earned through taxes that are available to collect every couple of hours, this sets a cadence to the game. Every few hours the game will put up a push notification stating that taxes are ready (no visible way to disable the notification). This will generally get you into the click frenzy in your town of gathering all the tools that are ready and falling quickly into playing a couple rounds.

The game does offer a cash to gold store if you want to expedite your game, but I have yet to run into a situation where I have been motivated to use it. The cash store seems to allow you to buy gold so you can build buildings and avoid the game play ( grind) that it takes to gather the resources naturally. As soon as I can pay to avoid playing a game I'm unsure if I really want to play.

The core puzzles are fun but I don't see much longevity in playing this game for me. Its a great way to pass a couple minutes but the puzzles start to have fairly clear patterns after a few hours. It does have a great casual hook and has consumed many of my hours.

You can find it on the apple store for free at the moment, play at your own risk =p