Reproduce a target picture by noticing which blocks repeat, defining each as a recipe once, and stamping it everywhere.
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How to play
A target picture is divided into equal blocks, and you rebuild it by defining a handful of small recipes and assigning one to each block position. Matching the picture exactly is only half the task — the score is about how few different recipes you needed to do it.
A recipe is a small sub-grid of coloured cells that you define once.
The layout assigns a recipe to every block position, and expanding that repaints the whole picture.
Any picture can be reproduced with enough recipes, so a correct answer is not automatically a good one.
You are scored on how few unique recipes the layout uses.
The skill being tested is decomposition — spotting the parts that repeat.
Controls
Desktop: click a palette color to paint, click studio cells, then click library recipes and build blocks
Phone & tablet: every paint and stamp action is a tap
Game modes
Difficulty: Easy, Medium or Hard pictures
Daily for a shared image, Practice for fresh ones
Tips & strategy
Look for repetition before you build anything. The elegant solution is visible in the target picture if you compare blocks against each other rather than reading it as one image.
A recipe that fits three positions imperfectly is usually worse than one that fits two exactly — but check, because near-misses are where the savings hide.
Rotations and mirrored shapes are often the same underlying part. Those are the reuses people miss.
Build the most common block first and let the rare ones be their own recipes. Optimising the exception costs more than it saves.
If you are using nearly as many recipes as there are blocks, you have solved the picture without solving the puzzle.
What you'll learn
Think Tiles is a puzzle about decomposition and reuse, finding repeating structure and capturing it once, the heart of good code.
For parents & teachers: decomposition and reuse, the heart of programming.
Origins
Rebuilding a picture by defining a few small recipes and assigning one to each block position is the idea behind the iterated function system: a large, detailed image described by a handful of rules applied repeatedly.
Matching a target with fewer recipes than there are blocks is where compression comes from.
That is a genuine result rather than a puzzle conceit. An image with self-similar structure can be stored as its rules instead of its pixels, which is the whole premise of fractal compression — and the reason a picture that looks complicated can have a very short description.
About Think Tiles
Think Tiles is a puzzle about decomposition and reuse, finding repeating structure and capturing it once. It is an original, free browser game built in-house for PlayPendium.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
