Croco Tiles is a solo logic puzzle in the SmartGames range, brought to Poland by IUVI Games. It takes us to the African savannah, where elephants and giraffes are looking for a drink and a hungry crocodile lurks in one of the watering holes. Our job is to place the animals so they can all drink safely.
The colourful board is made up of hexagons, and the animals sit on transparent puzzle pieces. The box contains seven pieces: four with elephants, two with giraffes and one with a crocodile. A booklet contains 60 challenges that get progressively harder.
To start, we choose a challenge and place the pieces shown in the booklet. Then we fit the remaining pieces onto the board according to a few rules.
The crocodile goes in the water, on a blue hexagon. Elephants and giraffes stand on land facing an adjacent water hexagon so they can drink.
The crocodile makes its entire watering hole off limits. Even an animal facing a different hexagon in the same pond has to find somewhere else to drink.
We can rotate and overlap the transparent pieces as long as they fit on the board and the animals face the right way. Each challenge has one solution, which we can check at the back of the booklet.
The transparent tiles make this a spatial puzzle. Once we have found a suitable spot for each animal, we still have to work out how to turn the pieces and in what order to layer them.
The gradual rise in difficulty gives younger players a chance to get comfortable with the rules before tackling trickier arrangements. Working out where everything goes takes planning, concentration and patience.
Croco Tiles is a good fit for children who enjoy logic puzzles, and the harder challenges will appeal to older children and adults who enjoy spatial puzzles.
The compact board and quick setup make it easy to pick up for a single challenge. We can solve one when we have a few minutes, put it away and come back to it later. That also makes it a good puzzle to take on a trip.
We thank IUVI Games for providing a review copy.
