Clack. Clack. I slowly woke to loud noises in my daughter’s room. Usually what we hear when she’s up before us is a soft murmuring as she plays with a toy or the distinctive sound of turning pages if she’s reading.
It took me a moment to figure out what she was doing, and then I remembered: GeoLogic, a new puzzle from Thinkfun. Though I have a few hundred mechanical puzzles, none have really engaged her the way this puzzle has, to the point of her reaching for it first for a few days upon waking up.
GeoLogic is an assembly puzzle where you’re trying to fit pieces onto a spherical object (in actuality, a 30-sided shape called a rhombic triacontahedron). The pieces are slightly curved clumps of rhombi ranging from a simple hexagon to a squiggly line. To give it a bit more flavor, Thinkfun has made the pieces look like biomes (desert, water, tundra, etc.) so that the end result looks like an attractive planet.
For each of the 60 puzzles, you are given a starting arrangement of pieces on the globe and a set of pieces you are to use to cover the rest. Fit them where you can, backtrack a bit maybe, and eventually get your new planet. Like all Thinkfun puzzles, challenges start out easy and get harder as they introduce new ways of thinking and strategizing.
When correcting a mistake, it can be a bit cumbersome to figure out which pieces to remove—each face is numbered and each piece has at least one gap where you can see a number, but it can take a moment to, say, figure out which of the three tundra pieces was a starter—and a bit cumbersome to actually remove them, but overall this is an engaging, tactile puzzle that builds spatial awareness.
