Magic Forest from SmartGames

This week's Puzzle in the Spotlight is Magic Forest.  This is one in a series of magnetic travel games from SmartGames.  These types of puzzles are fantastic for your summer Road Trips!

Magic Forest is made of fairly sturdy cardboard that folds up and snaps shut.  Inside you will find the magnetic pieces, the challenge board, instructions, and the challenges themselves with answers!  There are four levels of play: starter, junior, expert, and master.

Flip to the back of all the challenges and you will find some simple instructions for game play.  Choose a challenge, arrange the game pieces to make connections and you're done!

Here's a closer look at the game board and the pieces.  Each tile has a variety of paths.  Depending on the challenge you choose, you have to arrange the paths to connect the various items at the edges.  One tile has a black cat on it which might also need to connect to certain other items via a path.

Here are some of the challenges.  The green challenges are starter, and the red are expert level.  You can see that the starter levels are pretty easy with only one required connection.  The expert levels show many required connection and a some paths that should NOT be connected.  In challenge 29, you can see a red X on one of the yellow connection arrows and that means that there should not be a path between the weird tree lady and the frog!

Here's one challenge that Ginny and I solved.  It's number 22 which you can see in the upper left of the picture.  We needed to create one path between the tree and the tree lady and another path between the unicorn and the pot.  We also had to make sure that the black cat did not connect with the frog and book!  That is the solution that we came up with above.

You can see the solution they present for challenge 22 is rather different than what we came up with!  There are many possible answers for most of the challenges.  Personally, I like a puzzle with unique answers for each challenge.

If you need some travel games this summer, you might want to check out this line of puzzles.

Brain Cheeser - looks pretty cheesy! 

Busy Bugs

Noah's Ark

Tangoes People - there are a couple different versions of this.

Waterworld

These other travel games say that they have one unique solution per puzzle.  I would recommend trying one of those over Magic Forest unless you like lots of possibilities!