BoxOff is one of those mind-bending, frustrating and challenging but simple games that will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours. It’s a new take on that classic game of Solitaire and you will end up losing several hours out of your day, when it would seem only one or two have passed.
The game is so popular and inspiring; it made it onto the cover of the top-selling Games Magazine on its August 2013 edition. Steven Meyers is the brainchild behind this unique puzzle with a simple objective but a challenging task. What you need to do is to make all the stones from the board disappear; sounds easy enough but it’s not. Get on to those upper levels and you’ll be both amazed and frustrated as to how difficult a seemingly easy task actually can become.
For those of you that play Chess, you will know to be a grandmaster, you must think ahead of yourself by several moves; playing BoxOff has a similar strategy – think many moves forward and you will solve the puzzle.
To play the game you need to perform a series of moves where you’ll have to get rid of a couple of stones, making sure they are of the same colour. But the pair can only be removed if they occupy a rectangle of squares containing no other stones. But BoxOff is one of those games where several variations can be used to provide further challenges and much tougher game play.
You can play in Area Mode, where in addition to clearing all of the stones off the board, you have to find the pairs that offer the highest number of squares within the rectangular area. It may be possible to clear the board but you will not complete the level. And, there is of course the Stacks Mode, where squares can have stones stacked one of top of another.
The Stacks Mode gives the game of BoxOff a whole new level of depth and dimension to consider. It’s a bit like playing chess, only with three different levels or tiers, rather than the plain 8×8 chequered board.
What I really did like about this game though was the last update helped out players who are colour-blind. Simply select the option to determine which counter is green, red or blue. This is a great challenge for those that love a game of logic!
