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By Cronan, November 16, 2009 6:56 am

Golden Tangram – Puzzle & Trivia – 80 Points – Download

“One square. Seven pieces. Hundreds of puzzles. Endless combinations”. So goes the strap-line for this game, and the developer (one-man band Johannes Hubert of Spyn Doctor Games, in Germany) isn’t kidding around when he uses the word “endless”.

The tangram is a Chinese puzzle, brought to the west in 1802. The game consists of seven flat shapes, originally a square, which can be arranged in different ways. Solving a tangram puzzle means re-arranging the shapes until they match the image you’re trying to reproduce. In this game, the pieces all turn into gold when they’re fitted together in the right way, hence Golden Tangram. This is definitely a game that does what it says on the tin.

Golden Tangram is nicely presented. The design of the game is consistent, the controls work well, and with 250 puzzles this game represents huge value for money. If you get part-way through a puzzle you can save your current state, and the puzzles can be tried out in any order. The game provides three different shape sets, with the Crossbreaker set being especially challenging. If you’ve made it through all that, the game has a Freestyle mode allowing you to create your own patterns.

But all is not perfect in the world of the Golden Tangram. Sometimes the game just doesn’t work. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m pretty horrible at puzzle games, so I wasn’t surprised that I had to use the Interwebs to solve the trickier puzzles. That’s not the problem. What happens is that, although the pieces are all in the right places, the game doesn’t register that you’ve solved the puzzle. I’m not sure what’s going on, but the problem is certainly not helped by the lack of an “Undo Last Move” feature, the fact that you’re not able to have pieces overlap, even for an instant, and the fact that pieces cannot be moved so that they are partially outside the screen boundaries. Every time I had this problem, it was quicker to quit out of the puzzle and start again from scratch, than it was to try to adjust the pieces.

But this is, all in all, a minor issue in a good puzzle game. You’ll spend much more time solving the (occasionally diabolically difficult) puzzles than you will worrying about issues of game design.

Great value but some issues will frustrate you.