Guiding Trains in this Unique iPhone Puzzle Game

It goes without saying, that you tend to see a lot of the same type of game nowadays. Revised old concepts and clones tend to be safer, but more often than not, it’s the small folks that break that mold. Such an app comes from a single guy, Matt Rix, this time around, with a terribly addictive puzzle title for the iPhone called Trainyard. It’s a $1.99 app, that combines simple path-drawing mechanics with timing, planning, and color. Married with some simple, and non-intrusive social features, Trainyard is an app that has very little to complain about. Essentially, the goal of the game is to make it through well over 100 puzzles by getting all trains from Point A to Point B. Early on, the game is simple enough: Players get one starting terminal and one goal terminal and draw a path to get there. However, all trains and terminals and goals have their own color, thus only a train of the same color may enter the goal safely. Also note that paths are not as free-form as they are in other path-drawing apps (i.e. Flight Control). Each section of path is set within a grid space and will either be a straight or corner piece. It’s all fairly straightforward and intuitive, not to mention very, very easy for a good third of the puzzles. Despite the slow ramp up time, once you make your way to the more intermediate and advanced puzzles, Trainyard begins to take on its unique shape. To start things off, once all track is laid, users launch the trains, which all go at the same time. As you'd expect, later levels will have more than one train, and players must warry on when they or if they should collide, but more on why in a moment. Frankly, it’s easy to prevent if you need to as you can draw separate paths from the separate train terminals to the separate goals. At least at first. Eventually, rocks start appearing that the trains can crash into, which forces users to make multiple trains of different colors use the same track. Moreover, many puzzles will have only a single goal terminal that must accept X amount of Y color for a puzzle to be solved. This is indicated by a number of colored lights on the terminal. This means that if there are four green lights and four blue lights, players must ensure that four of each color reach the end safely. Remember the color? The way that trains use the same track is that each grid space can hold two pieces - a primary and secondary track. Without going into the fine details, if you launch two trains at the same time, and they combine where these two tracks are, they merge into one. Now, for trains of the same color, this is no big deal. But often the goal will accept fewer trains than are being launched -- as indicated by a number of lights on the starting terminal -- and thus you must combine them. At more advanced levels, the goal might require, say, a purple train. The only problem is, you have only red and blue trains. Well, now you have to build a track from Point A to Point B, and combine the two colors to make purple. The same works in reverse. If you combine the two and the goal only accepts red and blue, you will fail. As you can begin to see, all of these very simple rules begin to create a very complex set of results, and in the case of many puzzles, there are any number of ways to solve them. In fact, this is where the game’s social elements come into play. After completing a puzzle, users can actually post to their Facebook feed or tweet to their Twitter account their solutions. It’s not an earth-shattering feature, but considering the difficulty of some of the puzzles -- and if you have friends that play -- they are great additions. Oh? How do friends know the solution? When you post a solution to one of your social networks, it includes a nice video showing how you solve it. Truth be told, there really isn’t anything significant to complain about with Trainyard. It’s wonderfully creative, easy to learn, and has any number of possible solutions to its puzzles. Moreover, the rules are simple enough to create a near infinite number of new levels for future updates, or even potentially purchasable level packs. If there was any one issue to be had, it’s that the game takes a bit too long to really get started, and the tutorial levels get very old, very quick. Overall, however, for $2, its an app that is well worth checking out.

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Guiding Trains in this Unique iPhone Puzzle Game

Christopher Mack

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Christopher Mack