Culica
Culica was invented by James Eadon. You can play a variety of
different games and puzzles with Culica. This is very unusual, as most
puzzles have only a limited number of problems.
With Culica you can play many types of puzzle, including matching
puzzles, assemble puzzles and different sequential movement puzzles.
Culica consists of a black, hollow cube which has 3 x 3 Slots on each
face. In addition to the cube, there are coloured pegs (28 yellow
pegs, 28 red pegs, 14 blue pegs and 14 green pegs). The pegs are
pushed into the slots on the Culica cube while playing. Different
coloured pegs can be recognized very easily, even in the dark.
Moreover they are big and can be well taken into the hand by children
and grown-ups.
The pegs are delivered in a bag. Additionally there are four
instruction cards with which you can play five different games and
puzzles.
The website is very pretty. Thus there is a forum, a blog and a FAQ.
There is a page with further rules for puzzles and games. The rules
are ordered according to difficulty levels.
Currently, there are 16 puzzles and 17 games on the site, which will
be added to with more rules in the future.
The game rules are well illustrated with many pictures. A few puzzles
are based on classical problems, but most of them are new. Contrary to
traditional puzzles, where a problem is to be solved, Eadon often uses
a score-based system. This motivates the user for continual
improvement.
As there are so many puzzles, I will introduce only two examples:
CuFrog:
The aim is to fill the whole Culica with pegs. Thereby the colour of
the pegs does not matter. The pegs are put with a Cube Hop, which
means that each peg which is newly placed has to leave a space
or a peg in relation to the last peg which was placed. Cube Hops are
only straight, not diagonal.
The CuFrog is relatively easy to play and I managed at first trial to
fill all slots except two with pegs.
It takes about 15 minutes to play the puzzle.
CuRing: The constraint of CuRing is that pegs of the same colour have to keep
a minimum separation distance of four. This means that no two pegs of
the same colour can be closer than four spaces in straight lines,
however the spaces on the diagonal axis don't matter. I managed to
fill the CuRing up to 14 open slots.
Here is my solution:
It shall be possible to place 48 pegs on the Cube
so that only 6 slots stay open. This means that 12 pegs of each colour
have to be placed. This problem is already interesting as I did not
manage to place more than 10 pegs of the same colour. The game lasts
about 45 minutes.
I was surprised that it is possible to play so many games and puzzles
with a cube and some pegs.
With this puzzle kids can learn logical and analytical abilities by
playing. In my point of view Culica is ideal for school breaks - the
games are short and you can play alone or together with several
pupils.
For adults, especially the harder puzzles such as CuRing are
interesting. (As well as competitive games like CuCombat).
You can buy the Culica on the official website.