Welcome to the first of our newly reformatted newsletter. This month we have a new game for you as well as a few articles that take a closer look at some of the features of our other games and a basic strategy guide for Mahjongg. We hope that you enjoy the new format. It's a lot more work to put it together but I think it really adds value to the newsletter and our site. Feel free to drop us a note with your thoughts.

BlackBox is a classic black box puzzle where you have to guess what's going on inside a hidden area based only on your input and a few clues. We took that basic premise and combined it with elements from Aargon to produce a new puzzle game. In our game the hidden area contains Aargon-like pieces and you have to guess which pieces and where they are by firing lasers at them. BlackBox was developed by one of the main level designers for Aargon. The Puzzle design is excellent.
To get a better feeling for the game here's walkthrough of one of the first levels.

There's a tendency with a game like Ratmaster to try to solve it by rapidly sliding tiles in all directions looking for a way out. As this article will show, the Ratmaster levels are cleverly designed puzzles that can be solved by carefully considering the layout. A good example is the level called 'Tennis Anyone?'.

When we set out to create Variations we knew that there were already many Mahjongg titles on the market. Why then make another? We felt nobody ever took the game one step further. There were games that used Mahjongg tiles in completely different ways, but never a game where the rules were tweaked just enough to keep the classic game fresh and interesting while remaining true to the original concept. In fact that's the entire theme of Variations.
Spares and Doubles mode changes the classic mahjongg rules in two important ways. First, any two tiles that are the same and sit side by side on the same level can be removed right away. Here's an example that would be impossible to solve in regular Mahjongg but...

There's a tendency with a game like Ratmaster to try to solve it by rapidly sliding tiles in all directions looking for a way out. As this article will show, the Ratmaster levels are cleverly designed puzzles that can be solved by carefully considering the layout. A good example is the level called 'Tennis Anyone?'.