Tangrams

The Tangram has been around for at least a couple hundred years. Chinese people invented it to piss off iPhone users with spare time for puzzling!

If you like puzzles you’ll probably like Tangrams a lot, especially if you’ve never tried to solve one before.  This traditional puzzle looks easy and, at first, it might seem easy. Play long enough and you will hit a wall, guaranteed. Seven pieces may not seem like a lot, but when you have to use them all to create a specific shape without any of them overlapping it can be pretty tough while still being fun.

Tangrams does a nice job of letting you select your pieces, position them, and put them back if needed. Just tap on a shape at the bottom of the screen (the numbers tell you how many are available) and it’ll appear in the left corner, and you can tap to rotate it. Drag it around with your finger or drag it back to the bottom of the screen to hide it from view until you want it again.

If you find yourself totally stumped because you’re a giant tard, you can always go back to the menu screen and get a hint which will show you where one of the pieces of the puzzle goes. Society teaches us that cheating is bad, but that’s obviously not true. Cheating is awesome when you’re too stupid to go any further, and I’m very glad Tangrams has this feature.

As it is, Tangrams literally does everything right. For the future, though, there are two things that I would really like to see implemented:

• Divide puzzles by level. Difficulty level is probably hard to classify because people come in varying levels of stupid, but I’m sure it can be done.
• Develop some kind of head-to-head play. Either incorporate a timer that disables cheats and repeats the same puzzle for Player 2, or make up some kind of wifi-based 1-on-1 thing where two people on different iPhones can race to solve the same puzzle.

Tangrams doesn’t need these improvements, but they’d really help extend the game’s already-great playability.

Brian Wurster has done a great job with this app and I honestly can’t find anything truly wrong with it… it’s clean and polished, very easy to use, and it includes over 400 puzzles. I guess all that’s left to say is that it’s well worth buying, and for only $2.99 you definitely need this app if you’re a puzzle person.