Culica

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.