Thrift Treasure: Architecto Puzzle Game
Some of our favorite single-player games are the puzzles offered by ThinkFun. With challenges that increase in difficulty the longer you play, they are appropriate for nearly every age range. Other companies have offered similar products, but we still consider ThinkFun the kings of the genre.
That doesn’t mean we’ll ignore titles that aren’t by them. Take for instance Architecto by FoxMind, which we found at our local Goodwill for a couple bucks. We’ve played a number of FoxMind titles like Manhattan, Museum Heist and Abalone, but didn’t realize they too had also ventured into the single-player puzzle market. This one caught our eye thanks to the promise of 3-D pieces and challenges of ever-increasing difficulty.
Inside the box you’ll find a spiral-bound book and 18 heavy plastic blocks of various shapes and sizes. Your goal is to recreate the model shown in the book using only the designated blocks for each puzzle. There are a total of 50 illustrations and each are rated according to their difficulty from one through six.
There is no timer nor competitor. You can team up with other people to help you through the puzzles if you desire. You may even find it necessary once you begin to progress through the challenges and start getting to the more difficult ones.
Thankfully there is an answer key at the back of the book that illustrates one proposed solution. In some cases there may be more than one possible solution! As long as your final construction matches the image shown in the book, you can consider that puzzle solved!
The isometric views of the individual models can be confusing to some. That’s the elegance of this game – forcing one to imagine what the pieces on the “hidden” side of the structure look like. Architecto is a perfect gift idea for a budding engineer or architect! Upon researching, we found out this is but one title in a series by FoxMind. We’ll have to keep an eye out for Equilibrio and Perspecto!
You can find Architecto on Amazon for around $23 or maybe you’ll luck out and find a nice example at thrift like we did!
What’s your favorite single-player puzzle game?
