A stick figure is only made up of a few lines, but it's easy to recognize as an image of a person. Likewise, Scott MacLean of Green-Eyed Games has turned a simple sliding block puzzle into a game about flowers, just by arranging colored tiles in a certain way. The rules of Petals are as simple as the idea behind it: click any empty space to pull colored tiles toward it. The goal is to combine like-colored tiles. The more you can combine at once, the more points you score. But if a click would combine two or more tiles of different colors, then nothing will move. The one exception to this rule is that if you can make a flower by surrounding a tile with tiles of all one color, you can collapse it all at once regardless of the color of the flower's center. You get big points for that, too.

That's all there is to it. There's no boss to fight, no powerups, and not even a timer, and that's just how it should be. The two game modes ("Puzzle" for solvable levels with move limits, and "Influx," where you play as long as you have moves left) and the ability to switch between a grid of squares and a grid of hexagons ensures Petals' replay value, and you can change the difficulty level in the settings if you're looking for a bigger challenge. It's a great way to spend a few minutes quietly stretching your mind, and you don't even have to water it.

Play Petals