AbaCruX - Mindful Gameplay

AbaCruX is a take on the familiar board game - a dazzling piece of entertainment in its heydays often rendered with the most exquisite game pieces and expensive wooden boards to entertain guests and as conversation piece. Some regions, as is still apparent in the naming of some of the boards, preferred certain designs: there are English, French, and even German board variants amongst many others and different boards require different solution strategies.

Players can switch boards at any time but will find only the first puzzle in each board to be unlocked at first. A 4-star solution (of 5) of that configuration is required to unlock the next puzzle and so forth. To remove a piece its neighbor simply has to jump over it into an adjacent empty slot. While leaving the last piece in the target location is the general goal and best outcome, there is also a timer to consider. One must beat the timer, or it's game over and faster times result in higher scores.

There are several ways to approach these puzzles. Step-by-step memorization is common but after a while a player learns to detect patterns intuitively and to think several moves ahead. One can get very good at this game, even at the more complex configurations available in Extra Boards but it is a learning process. To be sure these puzzles hard to solve but excellent mental exercise without a lot of flashy noise. Great to wind down or spend some unexpected downtime.

Marble or peg solitaire predate most written records of their rules, and only in the last few decades has anyone tried to solve them exhaustively rather than by hand. Part of the reason is arithmetic: a board with n holes has up to 2^n possible arrangements of marbles and empty holes, so even a modest board can produce billions of positions to sort through before a computer, let alone a person, can say which ones are solvable. For the English board, the same 33-hole cross shape both AbaCruX and most of this research use, researchers have gone further and catalogued every solution to its central puzzle, arriving at a total in the tens of quadrillions.

A large search space means many possible positions to review, but not necessarily more paths to a solution. Some of AbaCruX's more advanced layouts, like the infamous Siege board, have many slots and pieces, but their difficulty largely arises from their irregular shape rather than sheer size. Only a narrow set of jump orders successfully navigates the Siege board, and a single early jump made out of sequence can turn a solvable configuration into a multi-ball dead end. Familiarity with the theory or any of research mentioned is not required to enjoy the game; it is noted here for players interested in the puzzle's mathematical side.

Each board in AbaCruX holds 15 puzzles, with an additional 8 high-scoring, advanced boards available via in-app purchase, some are shown in the screenshots above. Solution attempts are scored and can be improved upon at any time. All records are local, with the exception of Game Center which is entirely optional but also a lot of fun. AbaCruX has been around for many years and is the ideal casual game. The design is sparse but unobtrusive, and each level a true challenge. The timer is unforgiving, and real focus a requirement. As mentioned, solutions to the more advanced puzzles are far from trivial. But then we're hardly meant to beat this game, or are we?

Install on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and now also, AbaCruX mini for Apple Watch.