Physics and Routing Puzzles: Thinking Before You Throw, Mow or Slide
Some puzzles are about matching; others are about movement. In the six games here, you don't rearrange a board so much as decide on one action, a throw, a path or a slide, and then watch it play out. They split roughly into two kinds: physics puzzles, where objects fall and explode, and routing puzzles, where you plan a route across a grid or a field. What they share is that the planning happens before you touch anything. The notes below come from our own play of each game's early levels.
Stickman Ninja Warriors is the clearest physics puzzle on the site. Level 1-1 sets the scene against a burning orange sky: your black stickman ninja with a red scarf on a ledge at the left, a prisoner in a cage on the right, and between them a V-shaped stone ledge in mid-air holding a red explosive barrel and a blue steel crate. You throw shurikens, and a blue aiming line shows where each throw will go before you let it fly.
The budget is the counter in the bottom-left: three shurikens on the opening level, with a plus button beside it. The intro card shows three stars to earn, and fewer throws mean more stars. That changes how you look at the scene. The barrel and the crate aren't decoration; they are the tools that let one throw do the work of several. Before throwing, ask what each object would do if it were hit, and where that would carry the effect.
Stars matter beyond pride. Stage 1 is a run of 15 levels on a parchment scroll, and Stage 2 stays locked until you have cleared the last stage and collected 140 stars. A careless three-throw clear early on can come back to bite you later, so it is worth replaying a level when you know it could have been done with fewer. We moved Stickman Ninja Warriors out of the runner category when we reviewed it, because it is nothing like a runner; it is slow, deliberate aiming.
Castle Assault looks like an army game, but the army does nothing until you build its road. The level is a long field of tall grass between two hedges, with your blue stick-figure squad waiting in a cleared pocket at the bottom and a red army standing in a clearing at the far end. You drag across the grass to mow a path, and the cleared path is where your squad can walk.
Coloured multiplier gates sit in pre-cut clearings along the field: an orange x2, a yellow x3 and a green x10 on the level we played. Route the path through them and your squad multiplies on the way. You win by arriving with more soldiers than the red army, so the puzzle is which gates to chain and in what order. One lesson we learned the hard way: on our first attempt the path didn't connect to the squad's pocket, and the squad simply stayed where it was. Start every path from where your army stands, then route outward.
It helps to think of the gates as multiplication rather than addition. Doubling a large squad adds far more soldiers than doubling a small one, so the order you pass through gates changes the result. When a big multiplier sits close to the enemy, it is often worth growing the squad on the smaller gates first and taking the big one last. Trace the whole route in your head before you start dragging.
House Paint is a routing puzzle with one quirky rule: the roller doesn't stop when you want it to. The level shows the front wall of a little house face-on, a purple roller cube in the bottom-left corner, and orange brick blocks sticking out of the wall in three places. Swipe and the roller slides until it hits a brick or the edge, painting every square it passes. The goal is to turn the whole wall from white to purple.
Because you can't stop in the middle of the wall, the bricks are your only brakes, and the way to read a level is to look at where each brick lets you stop. Work backwards from the square that looks hardest to reach: which slide would end there, and which stopping point lets you start that slide? Squares tucked beside the bricks and in the corners are usually the awkward ones, so plan for those first. The game responded to swipes in our test, not to the arrow keys, which on desktop means clicking and dragging.
Unfold Blocks uses numbers instead of physics. Level 1 shows a single pink square labelled 2 next to two pale empty squares. The number is how many squares that block can unfold into, and you send it toward the empty squares to cover them. That is the whole rule. Later levels are built around several numbered blocks on irregular shapes, where every empty square has to be covered exactly.
Reading an Unfold Blocks board is mostly counting. On level 1 the 2 matched the two empty squares exactly, and that kind of count is a quick check on bigger boards too. Then look for squares that only one block can possibly reach, such as the end of a narrow arm of the shape, and assign those first. There is a yellow SKIP button, but we would try the restart button a few more times first; the satisfaction is in finding the one arrangement that fits.
Stamp It moves the puzzle onto an office desk, complete with monitors showing a sales line chart and a pie chart, and an ink splat next to the stamp and ink pad. The level is a small white grid document, about five squares by five, clipped into a blue ring binder. A yellow stamp block sits on one square, and blue target dots and a grey symbol mark the squares that need stamping. You swipe to move the stamp in a direction, square by square, and the HUD counts your moves.
Landing on every target is the goal, and the Total moves counter rewards doing it in as few moves as possible, so the real puzzle is the order of the targets. On a small grid the shortest tour usually sweeps across the targets rather than zig-zagging back and forth; look for a target you can pass on the way to another. Stamp It also moved categories in our review, from arcade to puzzle, since there is nothing twitchy about it.
Castle Puzzle is the most strategic of the group. It is a 3D low-poly diorama: a grass grid split by a strip of water tiles, and at the top an enemy camp with a tent, crates, a barrel and a stone gate, guarded by four red soldiers marked level 1 around a yellow spiky figure, with wooden spike barricades on both sides. You start with 100 coins and a unit card for a blue horned-helmet warrior that costs 100. One warrior with a level 1 badge already stands on your side, and a tutorial hand shows him moving to an adjacent tile.
So the decisions are what to buy and where to stand it before the attack. The numbers on units are their levels, which makes the comparison with the enemy camp easy to read, and the water and barricades shape where you can go. We didn't confirm any way of merging units, so we would treat each placement as a choice to get right rather than something to fix later. One practical note: its buttons sometimes want a deliberate press rather than a very quick tap.
The common thread is that all six reward a pause before acting. In the physics game it is predicting what one throw will knock over; in the routing games it is tracing the route in your head before your finger moves. If you enjoy that slower rhythm, our post Reading a Puzzle Board covers the matching side of the catalogue in the same way.
