After a drought of decent puzzle games for my iPad, a whole bunch of them were simultaneously brought to my attention.

G30

You know that feeling where you can’t quite think of a word you need? It’s just on the other side of a fog that seems to have coalesced inside your brain? That’s the problem faced by the protagonist of G30, except it’s not words that have been forgotten — it’s objects. On each level of this absorbing little game, you are given a target item to assemble. You start off with something that seems close to right, but isn’t quite there yet. By turning an assortment of dials, you adjust the details — changing the shape of this part or that part, or rearranging the whole — until finally you magically assemble the eyeglasses, or the file cabinet, or whatever it is you’re trying to remember.

The game quickly becomes fairly complicated, as certain dials can’t be turned until other dials are properly positioned. Turning those dials, however, might screw up the evolution of your target item. Getting to the finish line then becomes a careful, logical ordering of steps — or, quite possibly, a whole lot of random turning combined with a vague intuition of how to reach your goal.

G30 by Ivan Kovalov. $3.99.

Pavilion

A maze game in which you’re not the one running through the maze. That job has been filled by a thin man in a brown suit. He, however, is more often than not at a complete loss at how to proceed through the game’s many gorgeously detailed levels.

You’ll help him out by ringing a series of bells. When our man hears a bell, he runs toward it — climbing up and down ladders, scuttling through passageways, anything it takes to get to the source of the sound. The only thing that will stop him on his way is the ringing of another bell. That will get our friend to swerve in his tracks and head for the new ringing sound.

Figuring out the order of the bells and the timing of ringing them is a tricky but fun challenge. (I am highly adept at making the little man run in endless circles.)

Pavilion: Touch Edition by Visiontrick Media AB. $3.99.

OCO

A maze game so abstract, it doesn’t look like a maze game at all. You are nothing more than a white square, and all you can do is run and hop. Your goal: Collect all of the yellow bits on each level, and do so in the least amount of time and/or with the smallest number of hops. (On many levels, these two goals cannot be accomplished at the same time.) This is easy enough on the lower levels, but before too long it’s going to take a lot of trial and error before the correct path through the maze becomes clear.

OCO by Spectrum48 Limited. Free with ads, .99 minimum to buy outright.

Achromatic!

In general my feeling is, spare me from any more “minimalist” puzzle games, and yet this one sorta snagged me. You have a field of random-seeming shapes: Circles, squares, oblongs. On each turn, you’ll trace a path from two like-colored shapes, passing through an assortment of shapes of a second like-color. (So in the above example, you can draw a straight line from one dark green circle to the other, passing through the blue circle-in-a-circle. If there had been other blue shapes along the way, that’s fine, too.) The path completed, all of the shapes you touched along the way will become the color of the starting and ending shapes. (So our blue circle-in-a-circle will turn dark green.) The object of the game: Make all the shapes the same color.

Additional rules throw complications galore into the mix. Your path can only turn on a square. Oblongs can only be passed through on their long side. When that circle-in-a-circle changes color, so does all its neighbors.

Ostensibly this is a logic puzzle, but unlike a pencil-and-paper visual logic puzzle, where each step leads inexorably to the next, it’s not always easy in Achromatic to see the path to the solution — trial and error is the order of the day, and a certain amount of feeling your way along. But when you finally do see how to reach the goal, it can be pretty darn satisfying.

Achromatic! by Nick Carney. $1.99.

Typoman

A side-scrolling platform game with a wordplay twist. You’ll do the usual things one does in a game like this — run, jump, avoid monsters and obstacles — but along the way you’ll encounter various letters and words. By manipulating these, you’ll literally change your environment. (Need an obstacle to get out your way? Perhaps the word PRAISE sits nearby. Just get rid of the first letter.) A very neat twist on the dustiest of genres.

Typoman Mobile by Baitian Technology Limited. Free with ads. $1.99 to buy outright.

Yesterday I officially launched a new Kickstarter, to help me get my rebranded puzzle project off the ground. Puzzlesnacks, as of this moment, is already 89% of the way towards its goal — and it reached that level in less than a day!

I’m hoping the whole thing might get funded just over 24 hours, which would be thrilling, and then we can move on to all of the fun stretch goals: Supersized Puzzlesnacks!

So if you like the idea of quick little puzzles that aren’t too easy but also aren’t too hard, click on through. For just $3 a month, you’ll get Puzzlesnacks in your in-box every week, plus lots of bonus puzzles. Climb into the higher reward tiers and I’ll send you some (or even all!) of my books, including the first volume of Puzzlesnacks, which will be in bookstores this summer. (More about that very soon.)