Utopia

UTOPIA

Another IPP puzzle was solved recently and it is a special one if I may say this. It goes by the name of UTOPIA and was designed by Sjaak Griffioen from the Netherlands and was his competition entry puzzle at IPP 2010. I bougth my copy at the online shop Sloyd from Finland for Euro 24,90. The difficulty level is mentioned as “changing” which is about right.

UTOPIA is a very clever and addictive puzzle game. You have a grid with 16 empty spaces to fill with 4 different types of buildings which differ in height, colour and shape. From each building type there are 4 buildings available. Now there are 50 challenge cards for the puzzler to solve split into two different phases. Every phase is split into 5 difficulty levels a 5 challenges again. The rules for phase one is similar to Sudoku which means there is only one building of its type allowed in a row/column whereas in phase two it is getting even more difficult because it is allowed to place more buildings of each type into a row/column. Every challenge card give you either hints or/and placed buildings already on the grid for you to fill the rest. The first few cards are done in less than 2 minutes but as you go towards challenge 50 it gets harder and harder. I could solve the difficult tasks in about 10 – 25 minutes. The exception were 2 specific challenges I needed like an hour each.

I can really, really recommend this awesome and highly addictive puzzle game to everyone out there. For me that is a real milestone and I love it! Go and buy one – nuff said!