IQ-Flow

‍IQ-Flow is another game I developed for SmartGames for 2026 and probably the most experimental IQ concept I’ve made so far in that range. All IQ games up to now have essentially been 2D or 3D packing puzzles: the goal is always to fill the grid with pieces. The only ones that slightly break from this are IQ-Circuit and IQ-Gears, which are also a connection games. With IQ-Flow, I wanted to push things further by combining a packing problem with a sequential movement puzzle.

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‍The objective is still to fill up the grid, but there’s a twist: you can’t place pieces freely. All the puzzle pieces are simple shapes made of 2, 3, or 4 connected squares, but you have to slide them into the board from its edges. And not all edges are open — the top side is completely closed because of the lid, and even on the other three sides, only certain sections are open for inserting pieces. On top of that, every piece has a sliding orientation. To prevent players from “cheating” and dropping pieces in from above, I had to engineer the bottom of the game board in a special way. The underside has a specific shape that allows for these overhanging structures while still being manufacturable with a simple top–bottom mould. Normally, such shapes would cause undercuts, requiring multiple parts to be assembled later. But this would have made the game too expensive, although the result would have looked less busy. Because the whole concept is about movement, I knew from the start that the game should be called IQ-Flow — with the tagline “Go with the flow.” To underline the theme, I added wave textures to the top of the board, which also serve as visual cues for the sliding direction. At first I thought the waves should run perpendicular to the sliding motion, like the grooves you’d leave in clay or sand when you push in that direction. But in practice, waves parallel to the sliding direction felt more natural and intuitive. When we develop new games, we also like to experiment with materials and finishes. For IQ-Flow, I wanted something that evoked the look of sand near the shoreline. In the end, we didn’t go with that, but instead drew inspiration from shells, which can also be found on the beach. Inside shells you often find a pearl-like glaze, “mother of pearl,” which shifts in color depending on the angle of light. That shimmering effect felt perfect here: subtle and reinforcing the fluid theme, even if it’s hard to appreciate in a static photo. Each challenge starts with an empty board. Because the mechanics are so different from typical IQ games, the Starter and Junior levels are kept very simple. They show the full solution, but the puzzle is in figuring out the correct order to slide the pieces into place. With 8 pieces, the simplest challenges can be solved in 8 moves, but more complex ones require moving already-placed pieces around to make room for others. It feels a bit like the opposite of Rush Hour by ThinkFun: instead of moving pieces to let a car out, you’re shifting them to get everything in. The Expert level introduces a completely different style. Instead of showing pieces, it only shows the orientations and positions of the wave patterns, without revealing colors or shapes. I like adding variety (I did something similar in IQ-Gears and IQ-Noodles), and here it becomes more of a pattern-recognition exercise. Once you deduce where the pieces go, the solution isn’t harder than the first two levels — but at first glance, it looks impossible. Originally, I thought this might serve as the Master or Wizard level, but in the end it wasn’t difficult enough, despite its deceptive appearance. The real Master and Wizard challenges return to the format of the first two levels: but now they show only partial solutions with a few colored pieces on their final position. What makes them tricky is that, while many different packings could theoretically solve the puzzle if this were a normal packing problem, only one configuration is actually achievable by sliding the pieces into the board. The order of moves might vary, but there is only one possible solution for the position of all puzzle pieces. At higher levels, the number of moves to get to the solution increases, and the number of “false” packings also grows.  IQ-Flow will be available Spring 2026.