Tile-based puzzle game sends you sliding into adventure [Reviews]

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Stencilsmith
Stencilsmith combines strategy, farming, mining and battle in a minimalist package.
Photo: Nicolas Sepi, Jr.

If role-playing games take too long, and you don’t think Threes is violent enough, Stencilsmith might be your jam.

It’s an endless puzzle title that has you sliding tiles around to harvest ore, craft weapons, and fight monsters, and it manages to do all of those things with beautifully simple and elegant style. And while everything looks pretty basic and charming, you’ll find after a while that you have way more to keep track of than you thought, and that’s when its ridiculous difficulty will start to gnaw at you like one of those wolves that always shows up on the board when you aren’t quite ready.

But it’s all great fun, and you should definitely check it out.

If you’ve played games like Threes or 2048 (or their hundreds of clones), you know basically how Stencilsmith works — swiping up, down, left or right moves every tile on the four-by-four grid that direction. Some tiles combine with others for different effects, whether upgrading a weapon or fighting an enemy.

Here’s the basic flow: You’ll combine pick and ground tiles to create ore cards, and combine those with “blank” swords to make weapons. You can also craft the pick with ore to make a more powerful tool that can dig up stronger material to make more formidable blades. Each weapon has a number in the corner that tells you how strong it is, and enemies have their own digits that show how tough they are. So you can defeat a two-point wolf with a two-point sword or two one-pointers.

If you slide a monster tile into a green tile (usually a pick), you lose one of your hearts. And when you run out of hearts or moves, you lose the game. But you can get hearts back by combining hoe tiles with ground ones.

It makes sense when you’re playing it, honest. I haven’t even mentioned the chests and keys that show up after you take out monsters, nor have I brought in the gems you can use to enchant your swords and make them really, super tough, because that’s probably too much to lay on you all at once. But it just shows that this app has a lot going on, but you don’t even notice once you’ve spent a little time.

So if reading about all these different rules and tiles didn’t make your eyes cross or fall out, Stencilsmith is probably for you. That seems like a pretty good test.

Stencilsmith is available on the App Store for $2.99 (current promotional price of $0.99). The developer gave Cult of Mac a free download code for this review.

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