The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Okay, let’s… well, let’s write about something less stupid than yesterday, hm?

Those hip cats over at the Video Games Hot Dog were talking about Trainyard. As you know, if anyone talks about any iPhone game and it is a dollar or less, than I will purchase it. This occurred, and I played it. Well, some of it. There’s a lot of it! And user created levels! But it is certainly a game.

Trainyard is a very abstract puzzle game that really has very little to do with trains. The idea is that there are train depots, who want certain trains of certain colors in a certain order and quantity. There are train stations that release trains of a certain color and number. You basically just draw tracks between them to make the trains go where they are needed.

However, the game is really weird. Trains can be smooshed together if two tracks combine at the point where two trains would meet. If two trains drive through each color, their colors mix, letting you make different colored trains. (So if you drive a red train and a yellow train past each other, you get an orange train.) What the game does is it will often give you way, way more trains than you need to deliver. You can’t deliver extra trains, so you have to figure out how to combine them. That’s the difficult part. You have to figure out timing and how to draw track so the trains meet at the right time. The main tool you have in doing this is switching tracks. This happens automatically, when a train drives over a track, so you have to set it up to cascade in a bit of a machine to get trains going where you need them to go.

There’s no timer, and no real motivation to push on via, I don’t know, a story or a scoring system or whatever. You can share your solutions with the world, if you want, and finishing puzzles unlocks more puzzles, but that’s really it. It’s just pure puzzles, and if that is your thing, there are a ton of them to work on here. I got a decent way in before I kind of burned out, and wanted to take a break. Then I wrote this. But it’s clear why the VGHD people liked it, and they are crazy “pure” puzzle people. If you are too, it’s totally worth a dollar.