Puzzle Review: North Pole Camouflage, Fire Escape & the SmartGames Line

By W. Eric Martin
November 14, 2007

Publishers: Smart / Educational Insights
Designer: Raf Peeters (for all items except Zookeeper’s Nightmare)
Players: 1
Ages: 7+ (except for Fire Escape, which is 8+)

ThinkFun (née Binary Arts) has had a lock on the mass-market logic puzzle for more than two decades, starting with its first release—Spin-Out—in 1985 and continuing through hits like Rush Hour, Brick by Brick and Lunar Lockout. With the continued success of the company, I’ve been surprised by the absence of competitors, but now Educational Insights, U.S. publishers of Blokus, is offering its own line of logic puzzles, most of which were created by Raf Peeters and originally published by the Belgian company Smart. How well do these puzzles stack up against ThinkFun titles? Let’s look at them one by one:

North Pole Camouflage
Many of the new offerings in Educational Insights’ line of SmartGames match the Rush Hour model: a set of plastic pieces that fit inside a travel case with a series of puzzles that escalate in difficulty. North Pole Camouflage is a prime example as the puzzle includes 48 different laminated cards that depict some combination of ice floes, open water, and eskimos who are either on land or sea. Your job is to fit six plastic pieces—four L-shaped and 2 I-shaped—onto the cards so that the polar bears on the pieces stand on empty ice fields and the fish are in open water.

The first dozen puzzles are easy, with outlines showing the shape and location of one piece, which start you on the path toward the solution. Once the training wheels come off, you have to start looking for details like the number of available ice or water spaces; with only six ice spaces, for example, you have a limited number of homes for the five polar bears. Have a large pack of ice in one corner? Then you know the L-piece with a lone bear must fit there in some manner.

There are only so many ways to fit six pieces in a 4x4 grid, but to its credit North Pole Camouflage doesn’t feel processional. Yes, you could just try all the combinations of pieces (which thankfully are one-sided) and run across the solutions, but you can almost always see a starting point—a location in which one or two pieces might work—and once you start testing your theories, you’re not going to think about trying every possible arrangement.

Overall North Pole Camouflage has been the most satisfying of the Smart Games series due to the range of puzzle difficulty and the mental feel of the challenge during play: not too hard and not too soft.

Safari Undercover
While North Pole Camouflage keeps you focused on solving the puzzle, Safari Undercover sometimes feels like it’s devolving into a process of grinding out the solution through trial and error.

Safari Undercover has four square 3x3 indentations in its beautiful and convenient carrying case, and the nine spaces in each indentation show one of five types of animals or a blank space. You have four 3x3 plastic squares with a couple of blocks knocked out of them, and your challenge is to place these squares in the indentations so that you reveal only a certain combination of animals. The first puzzles show you the orientation of all four pieces, then only three pieces, and so on until you enter the junior puzzles and are on your own.

The smaller number of pieces, along with the absence of jigsaw-like combinations (as in North Pole Camouflage), sometimes leads you to feel like just trying every possibility, then calling it a day. A moment’s calculation shows that this isn’t feasible. Four pieces can be placed in four different locations in (4!=4•3•2•1) 24 different ways, and each rotation of a piece reveals different animals, which means that each placement of tiles can show 4^4 or 256 different combinations of animals, for a total of 6,144 possible placements. It took awhile to find the unique solution on some of the master-level puzzles, but I certainly didn’t try that many arrangements.

Despite the relatively small number of possible arrangements, Safari Undercover still works well and provides a feeling of solving satisfaction.

Maze Ways: Cat & Mouse
This is probably the weakest entry in the SmartGames line, which is a shame as the idea is a great one, reminiscent of Friedemann Friese’s Turbo Taxi/Flickwerk. Once again, you have the great carrying case, with an indentation that holds nine square tiles in a 3x3 grid. The twelve spaces on the edges of the grid each have some image on them: a dog, a different dog, a cat, a mouse, cheese, a tree, doghouse, and so on. The tiles have different combinations of lines on them: a curve from one edge to an adjacent edge, a pair of non-intersecting curves, a pair of intersecting straight lines, a pair of straight lines separated by a bridge, and so on.

The puzzles, of which there are once again 48 in increasing levels of difficulty, require you to place all nine tiles in a logical manner—that is, with edges matching—so that you create paths between certain objects and possibly not create paths between other objects. The first puzzles are dirt simple: Connect the cat to the two mice; connect the dog to the bone and the meat; connect the gray mouse to the garbage can but not the cat. In later puzzles the relationships get more complicated: Connect the mice, and connect the dog to the bone and meat, and connect the cat to the tree, but don’t connect the cat and dog or the mice and the meat. I feel like I’m back in math class studying algebraic groups or topology. (That’s a good thing, by the way.)

Where Maze Ways fails for me is that multiple solutions are available for almost all of the puzzles. This is probably inevitable since the puzzle to be solved dictates only a few conditions, which gives you a lot of freedom in how you place the tiles not involved with satisfying the puzzle. For many people this openness would be fine, but I prefer the challenge of finding a unique solution. Must be the math background…

Zookeeper’s Nightmare
If you’ve played Rush Hour, then Zookeeper’s Nightmare will feel familiar. The puzzle has twelve animals on identical rectangular plastic tiles, and the twelve tiles fit inside a holder. For each puzzle, you arrange the animals in a particular pattern, with one animal removed to create a home space in one corner; your goal is to slide the animals around in order to move a particular animal into that home space.

So how does Zookeeper’s Nightmare differ from Rush Hour? While the tiles are all the same size, the animals on some of them protrude from the front or back of the tile, which keeps you from sliding them in certain directions. What’s more, the elephants, cheetahs and tigers protrude from both the front and back, making them the most difficult animals to manuever. (These three tiles have two animals on them instead of one, which is a nice visual reminder of their difficulty. Kudos to the graphic designer for this clever memory aid.)

Unlike the other puzzles in the SmartGames line, Zookeeper’s Nightmare comes with only 18 puzzles, but the rulebook does include instructions for how to create your own puzzles: which animal tile to remove to increase or decrease the level of difficulty, which animal to use for the goal animal, and so on. I’m not sure why this one is treated differently from the other puzzles, but there you are. Zookeeper’s Nightmare also lacks a spiffy carrying case.

Fire Escape
I love the title this puzzle carried in its original Belgian incarnation: Tower of Logic Inferno. “Solve this puzzle quickly or burn to a crisp!”

Fire Escape breaks away from the format of the other puzzles by using a two-sided vertical surface for the puzzle-solving area. The plastic stand represents a building with six floors, and for each of the 48 puzzles you slide a laminated two-sided card into the middle of the stand. You are a fireman, and you must rescue the lone person trapped inside a burning building. Multiple ladders connect various floors on the building, but fires have broken out of certain windows, blocking your way. Depending on the puzzle, you have one or two fire extinguishers to douse one or two fires and continue around the building’s ledge. Some of the puzzles have sprinkler systems on the building, and to use them to douse a fire you must first reach the spigot and spend one of your water tanks.

The two-sided nature of the playing board works brilliantly. You typically have to cross from one side of the board to the other to make your way up the building, and the puzzle layout provides multiple false paths to lead you astray. In a nice bit of graphic design, the firefighter and the extinguishers are magnetic, so they’ll stay in place on the building while you turn it around to figure out where to go next.

While I appreciate the cleverness of the puzzles, the one drawback is that they are essentially mazes, and the easiest way to solve a maze is to start at the end and work backwards: To reach this trapped person, I must climb this ladder, and to reach this ladder, I must walk around the ledge, and to do that…

North Pole Camouflage, Safari Undercover, Lunar Lockout, and most 3D logic puzzles don’t let you see the path to the solution this clearly. In North Pole Camouflage, I can’t start with the end and work backwards because I’d have to solve the puzzle first; with Lunar Lockout, which I discussed in one of my weekly columns, you know that you have to place a robot adjacent to the target space but making that happen is part of the solution-finding process.

Walking backwards in Fire Escape, on the other hand, can show you the precise steps of the solution. Admittedly this is more a personal weakness than a failing of the puzzle; if I restrain myself from walking the maze backwards, so to speak, then the challenge of the puzzle remains the same. When my cheating inhibitors are engaged, Fire Escape is the second-best puzzle of the SmartGames line.

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