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The Wiring In a Puzzler's Mind

    Hey, everyone. I once took a walk with two people. We were hiking a trail up a small mountain and the going was fairly rugged over the rocky terrain. Soon, we came to a forking of the path. From experience, I knew that one trail was steeper than the other. It would get you to the top a bit more quickly but the exertion was intense.
    The other trail was more gradual, the slope gentle and less arduous. My two companions disagreed on which way to go. One friend, a puzzler, wanted to take the difficult route. He said, "What's the point of going if there's not some challenge?"
 The other person said,"Let's just take the easy trail and have a nice relaxing walk in the wilderness."
     I wonder what makes up the puzzler's mentality. I  admire their gift, and their desire to figure things out. After some of the training I've endured, the last thing I want to do is figure anything out unnecessarily.
     This week I have been finding new puzzle games for Carley and a few for myself. I was growing tired of my favorites, 4 Elements 1 and 2. So I went to Google Search and typed in Games like  4 Elements, or something to that effect. I came out with several games that were very popular for I-Pad but were games I wasn't familiar with.
1) Cave Quest
2) Cleopatra's Jewels 1 and 2
3) Season Match 1,2 and 3
4) Paradise Quest
5) Kami
6) 10
     Let's talk about Cave Quest. This game is a match 3 sort of game but with a far more varied buffet of puzzling fun. You play as a young adventurer who dares to enter the mountain vastness in hopes of finding lost family members. You enlist the services of a wizard and must find some hidden objects to earn his services. This is not a pro bono wizard. If you want the dude's help, you have to find him some bizarre things like deer antlers and firewood. You also encounter fierce creatures like a 'too cute to be scary' ice monster. You find a body in the snow that was evidently a poor unfortunate who was searching for some mythical Shangrila, like your folks were.
    Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. There is a purple cloud that you have to dispel. It is a smoggy mess and it obscures your path and the game board until you can con the wizard out of his staff and make matches close to its gelatinous purple body. The rascal actually guards a hole in the ground which has the temerity to proclaim itself as the entrance to the "catacombs".
     You find stuff in this game. Some of it you use, some of it the wizard requires as his 'pound of flesh'. Ha, ha. I mean, the dude wanted me to bring him a crystal flower. #1, I am not in the habit of bringing flowers to a guy. and #2 where would I find a crystal flower, or any sort of flower on an icy mountain? Any guy that lives in a gloomy cave and wants me to bring him flowers is to be avoided at all costs. If I could transport this individual to one of my zombie games I'd straighten him out pronto. So I have to enlist the aid of Carley, who understands the puzzler mentality and shows me how to use the map to find the firewood I need and other things to pacify the oddster in the cave. She also fights the snow monster in a mini-game which features you and the monster taking turns making matches. I pictured myself in an icy hole in the ground, sitting cross-legged on the rock floor across from a monster. He has a look of concentration on his  frozen face as he tries to best me. Hey, if I win, he will probably just try to eat me. Sigh.
     Carley loves this game. She played it for two hours this morning. She says that it not a typical "tap, tap, tap" hidden object but is very fun, varied, imminently playable without extremely difficult passages. She has coerced the wizard out of his cauldron, stuffed a turtle into a hole in the wall of a cavern, (her frog would not work) and done all manner of cool, if perplexing tasks. It is unusual for her to wax effusive about any game. She loves this one.
    This is a really good game. It is free to try, with a $2.99 unlock for the whole game. From this windswept, icy cave, across from this chilly person, I am CE Wills.
P.S. the wind sound effects of this game reminded me of Kansas.

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