Big Fish Fridays -- Natalie Brooks: Secrets of Treasure House

Natalie Brooks: Secrets of Treasure House is part point and click adventure, and part hidden item puzzle. Follow Natalie as she returns to her late Grandmother's home and begins to uncover secrets that will change her life forever! Along the way you'll consort with smugglers, search a museum storage closet, and even spy on the chief of police. Can you uncover the truth before the city demolishes your family home in favor of a new highway?

Big Fish Friday: Coffee Rush

Part match three game, part food service, Coffee Rush is the perfect blend for coffee lovers and haters alike. Match ingredients to fill orders, then don't forget to deliver the coffee and collect the money too! How many recipes can you earn?

Wild Games -- Lumines

Lumines on Wild Games is an addictive and fast-paced puzzler that you simply have to try to believe. The idea is to create blocks (2x2) of the same color which are then removed as the sweeper moves across the playing field. Sounds simple enough, but the game speeds up faster and faster until you don't even have time to think about where the block should go. See how many levels you can make it through before you lose control!

SquarO

SquarO is a fun little logic puzzle, reminiscent of minesweeper. In this one though, instead of finding which adjacent squares have mines in them, you have to figure out which of the corners of each square should be filled in. As you solve for each square, the number it contains will turn black, but be careful -- that doesn't necessarily mean that your solution is correct! With four different difficulties, there's a SquarO puzzle for any skill level.

Shift

Shift is not your average puzzle platformer. It starts out simple enough... arrow keys to run, space bar to move, collect keys to open locks, and get your guy to the door to move on to the next level. But then things get a little strange and you learn about shifting... When you hit the space bar, all of the positive space and negative space is reversed. For those who don't follow, that means that if the floor and walls are black and the air is white, the whole map flips and now the white parts are the floor and walls and the black is the air. Use this to your advantage to find your way through each level and move on to bigger and more complex puzzles.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game

This mostly-text-based RPG re-creates the story of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a puzzlingly humorous way. If you're at all a fan of the HGttG books, you should certainly give this a try. After all, it's mostly harmless.

Naturalchemist

Today's game is called Naturalchemist. The idea is to combine potion ingredients into sets of three or more so that they form the next ingredient in succession. Keep leveling your ingredients up and eventually you may produce gold nuggets! Your score in each game is converted at the end to ingredients you can then use in a cauldron to produce all kinds of fun effects like changing your avatar on the site and such. You can also use any gold you earn to spin the magical wheel and earn upgrades and ingredients.

I should note though that while this is a free game, only one play per day is free. If you want to play more often than that, you'll have to spend some dough on tokens.

Draw Play

In Draw Play, you get to draw your own levels! Well, mostly. The obstacles are already there, and getting over, under, around and through them can prove to be quite tricky. This game is sure to challenge the creative thinker in everyone.

Big Fish Friday: The Sims Carnival SnapCity

Kind of a mix between Tetris and a Simplified Sim City, all set to music from The Sims, The Sims Carnival SnapCity is a fun diversion that any puzzle gamer can appreciate. Place puzzle-shaped zoning divisions in your city to create the perfect balance of residential, commercial and industrial properties. Be sure to pay careful attention to those bonus grids to add special structures. Make sure all of your zones have good access to transportation, or they'll become run-down. And don't forget to quell disasters like tornadoes, riots and even alien invasions before they wreak havoc on your helpless populace.

TylerK's Picross

Time for another Picross site! I don't know why, but I'm pretty well hooked on these puzzles. For those who missed the explanation last time:

Picross is a game where you have to fill in a picture on a grid. Do this by using basic logic skills to fill in the blocks on the grid. Each column or row tells you how many black blocks there are, and how they are grouped. From this information, you must determine which are black and which are white. Clicking a block once will turn it black, click again to put in a placeholder if you're sure the block should be white. I recommend turning fade on, so you can see which rows are already complete.

Edit: Not sure what happened to the picture, but it's back now...

Featured Games: Osmosis

Osmosis is a fun little physics game that will really make you think. You've fallen asleep in the middle of a physics test. A sheep appears to help you with your test. You now must maneuver your sheep through a maze, while manipulating spin, friction and gravity to help him avoid obstacles.

Featured Game: Laser and Bubbles

Laser and Bubbles is a chain reaction game that's just a little different than most. Your mechanism for starting your chain off is a set of two lasers, one horizontal one vertical, which fire simultaneously. They fire at a screen full of colored bubbles, which each pop in a way specific to their color. I find that the lasers make my brain work in a way that is different enough that it can be a bit of a challenge, just to aim! Maybe I've been playing too much BoomShine though... lol

Featured Game: Reflex

Some of you may remember the classic puzzle game "Reflexion." Reflex is simply a remake of that gem. The idea is to maneuver the ball through a level by bouncing it off of various mirrors. You have to hit all of the coins in the level, then make your way to the exit. Of course, there are plenty of obstacles and challenges to get in your way.

Featured Game: Ladybird Logic Game

Test your logic skills in this addictive puzzler. Ladybird Logic Game is a simple enough premise. You have to place all of the tiles on the board so that each of the numbers on the tiles matches the number on its adjacent tile. It may sound easy, but it can be quite tricky! Each time you solve a puzzle, the ladybug will move up the post a little. Once you solve enough puzzles for her to reach the top, her firefly friend will shower you with stars! Can you make it all the way to the top of the pole?

Featured Game: Splash Back

Splash Back is a fun little puzzle game that is a lot more challenging than it appears. You start out with a board filled with little globs of green goo, and 10 drops of green goo in your tank. Adding a drop of goo to an almost full blob will cause it to burst and send drops flying out toward other blobs around it. The catch is, you will not be given more drops, unless you earn them: one for every combo of three blobs burst with a single drop, and one for every level cleared. How long can you make your 10 drops last?

Bon Voyage

Bon Voyage is a point and click puzzle game. You were supposed to meet someone, but you get to the meeting place and find him to be missing. Use your sleuthing skills and a bit of luck to escape to the island and find out what happened to your friend.

PLANned

PLANned is another of those games that come to us via JayIsGames' Casual Gameplay Design Competitions. This one is from Competition #2, with a theme of "Grow". You start out with a number of squares positioned on a grid. Each time you click on a square it will grow. When two squares touch each others' corners, they are frozen and can no longer be manipulated. You can't click on the same square twice in a row. Within the parameters of these rules, you must form a chain that connects to all of the squares together. Sounds easy? Just try a few levels.

Ball Physics

Ok, the name kinda sucks. I'll be the first to admit that. But Ball Physics is actually a pretty good little game. There are two types of balls on the board. The camouflage ones are your troops. Soldiers, tanks, hunters, sirens and ice cream trucks. (That last one is a decoy, but it's pretty effective!) The black ones are bombs. You have to destroy the bombs before they explode, all the while working around a series of traps and obstacles, in order to save the world from the dreaded Dr. Destructo and his diabolical plans.

Featured Game: Cirplosion

At first, Cirplosion looks like another boomshine take off, but it isn't. There is no option for chain reactions for one thing. Click your mouse once and hold the button down until your circle is as big as you can get it without touching either the floating dots or the edges of the board. Then release the button and move your circle on top of as many of the dots as you can. Click again to remove any dots you're covering from the board. In some levels you may get only one shot to remove them all. In others, you can use multiple cirplosions. The clock is always ticking though, and there's never as much time on it as you'd like.

Featured Games:

Somehow, I seem to have missed posting yesterday. See what happens when I give myself the weekends off? So, since there was no game for Wednesday, there will be two for Thursday.

The first is Excit. It's a game that I'm sure you've played before, just not quite like this. The object is to move your cursor to the exit. Use the arrow keys to move in any direction, but you won't stop unless you hit something. Work your way from block to block until that big green sign is in view, and then go for it. Oh, and the entire thing is played on a spreadsheet...

Game #2 is a classic. Gold Miner was popular enough that it spawned a sequal (or two). Press the down arrow key to send your claw searching for loot. Be careful what you pick up though, heavy objects take longer to reel in than light ones and rocks really aren't worth much. Each level has a goal, and your money earned carries over to the next level. Once you complete a level, you are sent to the bonus shop where you can purchase supplies to help you on your way, but if you spend too much there, you may find yourself in trouble in the next level.