Apple Twist

Apple Twist is a compact puzzle game with 60 challenges I designed for SmartGames in 2020. 

AN APPLE A DAY…

I don’t know exactly how this project started. I was always a fan of the children’s picture book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle, but maybe the idea was triggered by Jennifer, one of my US colleagues. She wanted to know if we could make a more compact, cheaper version of Quadrillion. The nice thing about Quadrillion is that you can play it without challenge booklet if you want. To set up a challenge, you just randomly create a game board. There is always a solution.

But to avoid using a lot of expensive magnets, like in Quadrillion, I needed to come up with a simpler mechanical solution. The result is an apple shaped game board, divided in 5 segments. The segments are all connected with each other using the core as an axis. Each segment has a different front and back. You can easily change your game game board, by rotating one or more segments of the apple. This way 32 different setups are possible. 

Not only the game board can be transformed. There are 3 caterpillars. These puzzle pieces are also made of different parts which can rotate. We could reuse a lot of the parts developed for Bend-It, an older abstract game I created a long time ago and that is no longer in production. We only needed to add heads for the caterpillars and make them in bright colors. The extra advantage of adding the head, was that you can’t place the piece upside-down. This looks much better than Bend-it, where often the hinges were visible. All technical issues were already ironed out when we designed Bend-It. Each caterpillar bends in a different way, so the shapes you can make with each one are unique .

The game board has dimples. The object of the game is of course to place all caterpillars horizontally on the game board, so that the ball shaped body parts rest into these dimples. There are only 32 possible game boards, but I needed 60 different challenges.  To solution for this problem was to give all STARTER challenges the same game board (1-2-C-4-E). But each STARTER challenge gives different hints showing the position of the heads of the caterpillars. This way each challenge still has a unique solution for the caterpillars, although the setup is the same. For the JUNIOR level we did something similar, but with a another setup this time (1-B-C-D-5). We used 1 setup for the 15 Starter challenges and 1 setup for the 15 Junior levels, so we still had 30 different setups left over for the remaining Expert and Master challenges. That means that for those levels, you have to adjust your apple game board, every time you start a new challenge. But manipulating the apple, is one of the most fun parts of playing with Apple Twist  and can be done very quickly. It makes a satisfying clicking sound.

With only 3 puzzle pieces, never because extremely hard. That’s why it’s targeted to children age 5 and up.  When solved, some of the dimples in the apple will remain empty, depending on the game board you used. This compact game doesn’t have a lid or cotton bag, so you need to store it back inside the cardboard box it came in (so don’t trow that away). But the game consists of 1 game board and 3 big caterpillar pieces, so the chances of losing a small piece are non-existent.