Sym-a-Pix Light

The solutions to many of these puzzles are pretty abstract. This makes them impossible to figure out without extensive trial and error, which I find to be completely lacking in the fun department.

Its a clever idea, but once put into play shows to be dull and frustrating.

These were my favorite puzzles on Conceptis for a while. I especially like the aesthetics - all the clues are pictorial, no numbers or letters or any kind.

My problem with these "light" editions is, again, that they are too trivial and easy to solve. They are good for teaching you how the puzzle works, but you really need to go to Conceptis site and purchase "real" puzzles to get the actual taste of them.

This puzzle has been on Simon Tatham's puzzle site for years (under the name Galaxies). The only difference with these is that they're using multiple colours.
You don't need to use trial and error to solve them, but it does take a while to get into the right mindset.

Trial and error? Nonsense.

There's a learning curve, sure, and it takes time for one to figure out the method of solving these puzzles. But said method has no trial and error whatsoever, to claim something like that is downright absurd.

Is there a way to make the game window bigger? I have a hard enough time clicking the edge I want and not the middle of the square in the smaller puzzles, and the bigger puzzles make everything impossibly tiny.

JIGuest -> No guessing needed. You can work out everything.

Isi -> The flash code appears to be hard coded to a particular size which is a complete pain. All the usual methods of making it larger don't appear to work. On my screen it takes up exactly 12% of the available space which is stupid.

isi - when I zoom in, the puzzle window changes in size relative to the puzzle - maybe that will help?

@Isi - You can open the flash swf url (https://games.jayisgames.com/sym-a-pix-light-vol1.swf) in a separate window or tab. Wait until the game finishes loading, and then right-click anywhere in the empty space outside the game to bring up the "zoom in" option.

The standard size, especially with the 20x20 puzzles, are a pain on the eyes.

Really nice puzzle :)

So the light version has some features removed? This is weird.. I would expect the light version to be a just limited number of puzzles. Taking features off is like a demo of Crysis 2 with simplified graphics, sells the idea that it's badly implemented.

Following (useful) features are missing:

- zoom in/out
- preview picture/time/pause
- info/about
- auto-solve trivial clues
- auto-fill symetrical walls (personally I hate this one)
- print puzzle

but these puzzles are so tiny and so easy you do not really need those features. Well, except zooming, that would be kinda handy.

Btw, for anyone who likes these logic puzzles, you should really check out the discounted weekly packages you get on the conceptis site. I bought a few of those, they are positively dirt-cheap, and they last quite awhile if you want to solve all of them (and not resort to cheating).

Unfortunately, if you're interested in only one type of puzzle, the other deals they offer aren't quite so good as the discounted weekly one. Still cheap, though, but pretty far from the terrific deal you get with the weekly one.

Thanks, grendel9. That suggestion worked.

It took me a decent while to get the hang of the first few, but I enjoyed them (...minus the tedious individual filling out of the opposite walls) by the time I finished the "easy" set last night.

the biggest fault of these games is that checking your game automatically reveals wrong solutions, thus taking the pleasure of finding and fixing those from you.
otherwise these ...-a-pix games are very addictive and great fun to play.

Conceptis also have one puzzle of each type available free each week on their main site. These are often only easy to medium difficulty.

@P,

well you're the one who is pressing the "Check solution" button. If you don't want something spoiled, it is usually a good idea to ignore the "spoil this for me" button. :p

Galaxies is one of my favourite games from the Simon Tatham puzzle collection - I play it a lot.

I originally thought that Sym-a-Pix Light was so similar as to be directly derived from it but it probably isn't: the Galaxies helpfile explains that it was itself derived from a game called Tentai Show, by Nikoli, and since it turns out that Nikoli's puzzle includes the picture feature that Galaxies lacks, it's much more likely that Sym-a-Pix was derived directly from Tentai Show.

There are two significant differences between Sym-a-Pix and Galaxies. Firstly, in Sym-a-Pix, closed regions around a center point get coloured in whether they are symmetrical or not - this makes the weirder shapes a little trickier than in Galaxies, which only colours in symmetrical regions.

Secondly - and this is much more important in terms of the gameplay - perhaps as a result of the constraint that each puzzle must be a picture, there seems to be a significant reduction in the variety of shapes and sizes of the symmetrical regions to find, making them significantly easier to solve than the average Galaxies layout. In particular, there seem to be many more single blocks than in Galaxies, and - at least so far for me - very much less time at the end of the solving process shifting the unmatched blocks around the playing field until they are all gone.

Having said which, Sym-a-Pix is a great game and thank you for posting it.