A few days ago Sheeping Annie blogged about having to stay in her classroom in the evening because it was a parent conference day. All her conferences had been scheduled for the afternoon, so she was very bored. Someone commented, “go play Fantastic Contraption.” I finally had a chance to try it today, and I have to agree — it is a blast! I don’t know if I will completely stop playing solitaire, but it might happen.
The idea is to design mechanisms which will move an object from its starting position to a goal. You build a mechanism by dropping powered wheels (choose a direction for it to rotate) and unpowered wheels into a work area and connecting them to each other and to the payload object. Then you click “start” and watch to see if your gizmo can get past all the obstacles.
Here’s my design to solve the puzzle “Junkyard.”
MAC had a version of this for educational software called “The Ever-More Incredible Machine”. When I went back to MAC I anxiously anticipated being able to play this again. Unfortunately all those games for OS’s before X are not compatible with the new MACS and certainly not with Leopard. sigh…….