Base price: $15.
1 player.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 11 or so puzzles.
Full disclosure: A review copy of Rubik’s Gridlock was provided by LKPR Marketing.
I haven’t gotten a lot of time to do puzzley stuff, lately. The closest I got was Balatro, which, real talk, definitely consumed my entire life for like, a week or two, there. It was awesome. Can’t wait for the horde of casino-themed roguelike imitators. In the meantime, though, I’ve been trying to get a chance to bust out more solo games, like the various Button Shy titles I have and some of these more puzzley guys. So let’s try out one of those puzzley guys today, with Rubik’s Gridlock!
In Rubik’s Gridlock, your goal is simple. You’ve got a card that shows you where the three small white pieces go, and everything else needs to fit, too! No overlaps, no out-of-bounds; just making it all work in a tiny grid. So pick up your pieces, rotate, place, and try again to make sure you’ve placed everything correctly! Once you have, move on to the next of 88 possible puzzles! Will you be able to make it all fit?
Contents
Player Count Differences
None! It’s a solo puzzle game.
Strategy
- Try to see if you can place a few relevant pieces first. Especially on the easier puzzles, you can usually place the single-block-wide pieces first (since there are only so many places they can be placed). Look into spots that feed into a good process of elimination. Subsequent puzzles won’t be so easy, though! Be warned.
- Look into ways to substitute combinations of pieces or styles of pieces to increase your overall flexibility. Eventually you’re going to start having to figure out how to make certain shapes out of combinations of pieces if you want to advance. Knowing what can possibly go where can help a lot.
- Remember: there’s only one solution. There’s not going to be any variations or wiggle room here, so expect to find a singular way to do this.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Nice clacky pieces make the whole experience positive and tactile. I’m always pleased when something doesn’t feel cheaply made. The starter blocks lock in quite nicely, everything fits when it’s placed properly, and the various pieces are a good, pleasant plastic that’s nice to hold. It’s a surprisingly well-built travel game for the price point.
- I will say, it’s nice that the whole thing fits in a little box. You can go a lot of places with this, especially if you’re looking for something you can put in a backpack or a medium-sized purse, I suppose. It would probably work a bit better for that purpose if it was magnetic, but that’s also going to raise the price point. Still should be great for a car trip or an airplane ride, if you want something that isn’t going to have a screen.
- Definitely a good puzzle for folks who like spatial reasoning stuff. A lot of it is visualizing how to fit a finite set of blocks into a perfect space, so it’s great for the organizers, the reasoners, and the people who really like fitting as many shirts as possible into a drawer. I’m the last one.
- The span of difficulty is pretty nice. Easy wasn’t too challenging for me and the hardest difficulty puzzles stumped me for a good, long while. I genuinely gave up on one of the hardest puzzles, so, that’s pretty good. You could likely guess a few pieces, but you’d be hard-pressed to do that consistently, just because of all the possible shapes and rotations and such. It starts out pretty simply, though, which is nice. There’s definitely a wide range of difficulty options.
- You can still have some collaboration on this, which is nice. This is definitely the kind of thing where you can just leave it out and have people try their hand at puzzles, or get a group together and try to solve one as a team. It’s all valid and it all works.
Mehs
- I did not immediately realize that the puzzle was on one level and the cards were on another and that you needed to twist the lock to one side or the other first. The first puzzle, really. Can you figure out how to open the thing?
- I do wish it were a bit clearer where on the grid the starting blocks go. Sometimes looking at a grid from afar can be tough to resolve without numbering on the X or Y axes; a little clearer demarcation would speed things up pretty nicely.
- A hint system would be nice. Even if it’s online, for some of the hard ones, even getting one piece in place would go a long way. This is a more general thing, though; I think just about everything should have hint systems.
Cons
- I guess this is just a failing on my part with regard to brand synergy, but I don’t understand why this is a Rubik’s-themed thing at all. I think there’s something to the effect of “it uses the same colors as a Rubik’s Cube”, but, that hardly feels like it matters, so I end up increasingly confused. I imagine there’s some branding thing happening where a rising tide lifts multiple boats, but even the Rubik’s Magic and Revolution felt more Rubik’s Cube-y than this, I think. That said, it’s a fun puzzle on its own, so, honestly, it doesn’t matter that much.
Overall: 7 / 10
Overall, I like Rubik’s Gridlock! I was pleasantly surprised, since I’ve kind of emotionally spun off of the Rubik’s Cubes of my youth. I don’t use them as fidget toys as much as I used to, so they just kind of sit around as I reminisce about doing that. This has some more puzzle value and less muscle memory value, which makes it nice to just have around. I may honestly bring it to my office and just leave it out for my coworkers if they need a quick puzzle break to just get their brains working differently (as we all need at some point). It’s very tactile and pleasant. Plus, the game’s case is a nice travel-sized container, so you can easily leave it in the backseat of a car for long trips with younger folks or bring it on an airplane if you refuse to pay for the Wi-Fi on principle. Which, I mean, American still charges over $10 for Wi-Fi, which is patently ridiculous. Either way, for the puzzle-oriented folks, this is a great little packet of spatial puzzles. If you’re a Rubik’s Cube fan, I mean, it’s still spatial, but it might not have the click-clack rotations that you’re used to. That’s just how the branding goes, sometimes. But otherwise, if you’re looking for a cute puzzle and you’ve got some time to kill, Rubik’s Gridlock is a lot of fun!
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