8/12/2023 0 Comments You in wonderland rose puzzle![]() ![]() These are largely a good thing, although not all modules are created equal. Maybe she locks one of the greenhouse’s tiles entirely, limiting you to an offer of three topiaries per turn. Maybe she penalizes you for placing spades. Maybe she takes two extra steps along the score track whenever you place a topiary without a clue. Even trickier, the Queen of Hearts now has a deck of powers that shifts during play. How you obtain those keys depends on the module’s objective. You’re still solving whims, but each module requires you to earn five keys to escape the rose garden. The solution is a series of modules - included in the deluxe edition or frustratingly parceled into the Escape the Castle expansion - for giving the game a much-needed tumbling. ![]() The hitch is that Paint the Roses grows samey after a few plays. Matches where previously all you saw was a garden of jumbled rose bushes. The result is one of those rare puzzles that occasionally winks your mind out, like the sudden blinding of an inner eye, only to have it blink open a moment later with greater understanding. Which, it turns out, does fantastic things for the game’s pacing, offering both brain-burners and refreshments alongside one another. At any given moment, you’ll likely be solving an easy puzzle, a pair of mediums, and striving to break the code on something extra tricky. Even tougher, you’re required to guess one whim every turn or risk the Queen briefly doubling her speed. Harder whims move your gardeners extra spaces along the score track, but they take longer to solve. The whole thing is pitched as a race, your hapless gardeners sweating to stay one step ahead of the Queen of Hearts’ axe. Paint the Roses softens this emergent complexity by encouraging players to carefully balance which decks of whims they draw from. More clues, more insights, more minds stitching together leads… even the additional missteps that can arise as everybody works through the game’s logical processes. ![]() These conundrums grow even more interesting with the addition of extra players and their accompanying noise. These are the sort of clues that get everybody recalling data from three turns ago: “He’s either pink or heart, and that one tile showed he was matched with purple, pink, spade, or diamond, but he didn’t place a clue on this latest tile, so we know he’s pink or heart paired with a diamond or a spade.” The best clues are often negations, those that arise when a tile lends no positive information about a player’s whim. In fact, it isn’t uncommon to learn the crucial tidbit about a difficult whim on a player’s off-turn, when the right combination of topiaries happened to reveal itself or thanks to the process of elimination. This keeps individual players in the limelight over longer periods of time, rather than requiring them to reveal information only within the span of a single turn. Anybody’s whim can be guessed on any turn. Every placed tile might result in clues, no matter who placed it. By allowing everyone to talk, to be both investigator and the investigated simultaneously, Paint the Roses is downright freeform. Most limited communication puzzles require either total silence or the silence of the current player. Trying to give clues for a difficult card. And all the while, you’re allowed to discuss any clues and whims but your own. More often, clues spill gradually onto the table. If somebody puts three clues on a tile that was placed next to three red roses, well, that’s the tile solved. Sometimes this leads to obvious situations. The more clues, the more matches there are. Then everybody at the table places clues on that tile to indicate whether it and the adjacent topiaries match the whim they’re holding. And hard may be either of the former or can cross the gap between color and shape - yellow to spade, for example.Įvery turn, you place a single tile into the rose garden. Medium whims depict either paired colors or paired shapes. The easy deck is all about color: yellow to yellow, red to pink, that sort of thing. Beside you are three decks, each featuring a different difficulty of “whim” that the Queen insists must be painted or trimmed into her rose garden. Your boss, the Queen of Hearts, tends toward the demanding. For now, these are the only details that matter. Each topiary has two distinguishing characteristics: the color of its roses and the suit of its shape. Or look at the image above if you suffer from aphantasia (hi, Brock!). Imagine with me a hex grid filled with topiaries. Leading the Queen of Hearts on a merry chase.Īs is always the case with puzzle games, explaining Paint the Roses requires some rules talk. ![]()
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