365 Puzzle Club

There are three different kinds of puzzle in 365 Puzzle Club: Sudoku, Kakuro and Tenpenki. Sudoku is everywhere, so let’s not belittle anyone by explaining what that is, but the others deserve explanation.

Kakuro presents an almost crossword-like grid with numerical headers. The adjacent cells must be filled with numbers totalling that header, with a number only used once in a sequence. So, for example, a header of 4 will have two cells following it. The numbers in those cells will be 1 and 3, though which way round they are is affected by the dependancies of other headers. This is probably the puzzle with the steepest learning curve since it hasn’t been done to death elsewhere.

Tenpenki on the other hand is probably familiar to DS owners as Picross, although your Gran probably has some in those logic puzzle books she’s so fond of. The column and row headers of a grid tell you the sequences of filled squares. So, in an eight by eight grid, “8” indicates a full row or column, whereas the only solution for “5 2” would be a five squares in a row with an empty square before filling the final two. These feel the most rewarding, since successfully completing the puzzle colourizes the image you were working to create.

The title of the game comes from it having a calendar that presents you a daily puzzle, though it’s not the games strongest part. The best area of the game is dubbed Seasons. These are seasonally themed and timed sets of challenges that unlock harder difficulties and the next season on completion.

Add to that some social networking features and we’re onto a winner, right? Well, almost. The interface, which looks crisp and clean at first blush, feels rather clumsy when you get to the business of solving puzzles. All puzzles are solved by selecting a cell, then choosing what you want to do with on-screen controls at the bottom.

If that doesn’t seem so bad, here’s what you have to do to fill a row in Tenpenki: Select the first cell, tap fill, then tap the (small) on-screen d-pad control the required number of times. So in a row of eight, that’s nine taps instead of one swipe. Why not allow the player to draw the line with their finger?

So it would appear the most logical solution for the Tenpenki puzzles would be to have tapping a cell toggle between filled or not, and to allow drawing-like motions. With Sudoku and Kakuro, a three by three grid of numbers popping up around a selected cell (like Sudoku Unlimited), with an on-screen toggle between annotation and solution.

At only pennies over a pound, you can’t argue with the value proposition that 365 Puzzle Club offers. It’s just that it would have been much better if the puzzles played more intuitively. This being an iPhone game though, there’s always the possibility of an update that fixes everything. We can only hope.