Posted on by Mitchell Laurren-Ring

Beating GrowCube

A couple of weeks ago, Graham recommended a few game sites to me. It didn’t take long to get tired of Beeboxing, but solving GrowCube, the first game on EyesMaze, took much longer than I would have thought. After a few minutes of clicking the pieces in various orders, it became clear that there was a specific set of rules involved with each piece and one only had to had to figure out the rules. Since there were a finite (although large) number of playing combinations, I set about recording the results for several games:

Obsessive notes
Click to enlarge

As you can tell from my copious notes, I designated the pieces on left (top to bottom) as “bone”, “water”, “ball”, “bowl” and “seeds”. The pieces on the right I called “pot” (and sometimes “bucket”), “tube”, “spring”, “people” and “fire”. I tried the pieces in different orders and recorded the actions that occurred after each play. With these results, I was able to generate a set of rules that I could test. These were the initial rules that I noted:

  • People have 6 tasks
  • People cannot do more than 1 task per turn
  • Canal must follow well
  • Steps must follow canal
  • Steps/bridge must follow steps
  • Cave must follow steps/bridge
  • Lighting cave must follow cave
  • Seeds will not grow without water
  • Tube must be placed after seeds
  • Fire will level up 4 turns after placement
  • Fire cannot level up before pot is moved

At this point it became obvious that a long set of rules would not provide all of the information about relationships and dependencies that I needed, especially when it came to describing the changes that each object went through with each turn. So I decided to document these changes for some of the objects and try to establish rules based on those changes. I started with the most complicated objects (those requiring the most changes to reach “MAX”):

Pot life-cycle:                   

  1. Place
  2. Embiggen
  3. Embiggen (next turn)
  4. Moved (after fire played, 2 people)
  5. Plant added
  6. Fruit added
  7. ??
 Seeds life-cycle:                   

  1. Place
  2. Grow (one turn after canal is dug)
  3. Grow (next turn)
  4. Grow (next turn)
  5. Grow (next turn)
  6. Grow (next turn)
  7. Seeds (next turn)
  8. Fruit (next turn) MAX
Tube life-cycle:                 

  1. Place on seeds
  2. 180 turn (next turn)
  3. Extend to back (next turn)
    • pot hole must be available
    • seeds must be level 6
  4. Around corner (next turn)
  5. Through and up
  6. ??
 Bowl life-cycle:                  

  1. Place
  2. Tower (next turn)
  3. Plants (next turn)
  4. Bubbles (next turn) MAX

Bone life-cycle:

  1. Place
  2. Skull
  3. Horns
  4. ??
Water life-cycle:                   

  1. Place
  2. Lake (dug by people)
  3. Canal (dug by people)
  4. Down steps (dug by people)
  5. ??
 People life-cycle:

In addition, I also observed that the pieces activated during each turn in this order:

  1. seeds
  2. tube
  3. bone
  4. bowl
  5. pot
  6. people (activate water, fire, spring, ball)

Given all that, I established the following as my base play order:

  1. people
  2. water
  3. seeds
  4. tube
  5. pot
  6. fire
  7. bone
  8. bowl
  9. spring
  10. ball

After a little experimentation, I finally figured it out today (spoiler follows):

Solved!

Final order:

  1. people
  2. water
  3. seeds
  4. pot
  5. tube
  6. fire
  7. bowl
  8. bone
  9. spring
  10. ball