"Lozenge", borrowed from the Old French "losenge" ("rhombus" in English), gone through the Vulgar Latin ("lausa") all the way back to my Celtic DNA roots ("lausa", meaning "stone").
What's a lozenge? Well, we call it "losanga" in Italian too, but if I had to write something about it before playing this game I wouldn't have hit the perfect spot.. it's a quadrilateral, with sides of equal length and with two acute and two obtuse angles.
Got it? Basically a rhombus.. or a diamond.
It's the basic of Tangram! Which is actually the game that this one elaborated upon with some twists.
Tangram is available for free everywhere, now it's super popular on mobile phones too, and it simply refers to an old Chinese puzzle (which has a weird name, "qīqiǎobǎn", to be more precise) that consists of dividing a figure into some flat shapes (originally seven) - a "dissection puzzle". You are given, in these games, some figures (this game focuses on composed lozenges, but you'll often have to play with triangles and other shapes) colored all in a different way: with them, on a white board, you'll have to reproduce a certain figure. All the shapes must not touch or overlap, too.
What do we have here, so?
Being a twist of the standard Tangram games, the first thing that comes to our eyes is the lozange thing - all the figures that we'll have to make in the game are lozanges, as I said above.. but with lots of different figures made up by small triangles! In the main menu we can choose between some themes that will eventually change both the color of the shapes and the whole backgrounds.
As you can see in the screenshots, all the level will feature a gray empty board made up by small triangles - there will be whiter parts that must not be touched, and grey parts which need to be filled completely with the puzzle pieces you've got below.
In the lower part of the screen, in fact, we'll have some shapes made up by different small triangles that we'll have to use in order to complete the main board.
Clicking on any shape will rotate it, and also change its color (which doesn't affect anything by the way).
The goal of the game is to complete the random figurine on the main, big board - but here are the twists. First of all, there are no fixed levels - all the greyed shapes will be random every time you start a new game.. and second of all, you will get groups of three shapes random too!
But.. where are the other twists?
Well - you can actually, and you have to (since you need to put in the board all the three random pieces in order to get three new ones), put the shapes also in the white area, outside the figure. And when you complete a grey figure, all its pieces will fade out letting on the screen only those you left out of the shape you have just completed - and the game starts again!
There will be always a point calculator in the upper part of the screen, letting you know how many points you obtained by placing in the right position the pieces and completing the figures - there are really dozens of possibilities, since you can rotate every single lozenge/piece on the lower part of the screen!
Although the game lacks of an undo button, but it's really ok.. nothing too compromising, although every puzzle player always asks for an undo button =P
Apart from leaderboards and such, this game is a joy to play in single-player if you love puzzles. It's extremely relaxing, and for its price it's really well-made, it can be easily played with only the mouse and the soundtrack, although it gets boring after some minutes, is still relaxing, piano-based.
This is really one of those games open to all your family, and that can be enjoyed without thinking a single minute about a story, characters, whatever else.. it's just plug and play, if you get me. You click on play and you get a random shape to make; you get three pieces per time and with those you'll have both to re-create the grey shape and think about the next moves - when the shape will be completed and erased, the triangles/forms you put on the rest of the board will still stay there taking off some white spots.
As it is, it's an endless game with a single, random level. It's relaxing and it really does its job - if you like minimalistic puzzle games, this one can be definitely enjoyed in my view by anyone.
I think you'll get addicted to it! And growing up as a 30+yo adult, well, I love relaxing games like this one - you open it and you can spend just 10 or 15 minutes of your spare time to relax with a nice puzzle :)
