by W. Eric Martin

Finding a hidden treasure and introducing it to others intertwines hope and risk. Ideally the other person appreciates the discovery you're sharing, something they would likely never have encountered without your assistance...but if they're antagonistic, turned off, offended — heck, even indifferent — you often feel they're rejecting you as much as whatever you presented. After all, you found that item or experience special, so you were sharing a part of yourself as much as the thing itself.

Game publishers take on a similar risk when they find obscure titles and release them on a wider market. Sure, their regular game releases might fail, leading them to cast doubt on their publication choices, but when you're releasing a new edition of a self-published game, the risk feels elevated. Not only are you championing a hidden gem to potential players, a gem they might find flawed or dull, but you're promising the original designer a bigger stage, a chance for them to find a new audience. Will their hopes be dashed along with players?

In addition to releasing new editions of decades-old titles like Pueblo, Tonga Bonga, Big Shot (written/video review), and Tanz der Hornochsen! (video review), Korean publisher Playte has been bringing indie games such as Depot, Dot Zombie, DIGCODE and Streams Cross to a larger market.

Layer Puzzle is another such release, with designer Libon Van crowdfunding the game on Korean site Tumblbug in late 2023 for release in 2024 via the brand Candy Games.

Layer Puzzle promises a layered puzzle, and that's what you get, with no frills other than a red dry-erase marker with which to dye mistakes onto your brain so that you see patterns of your failure against the wall late at night.

Here are the layers in question:


Look at those grids! So empty! Your goal is to mark all of the squares and vanquish those voids. To do this, each turn you reveal a new shape card, whether basic:


Or advanced:


The lead player that turn chooses a quadrant token — A,B,C,D — that hasn't yet been used, then claims one of the shapes and marks it on their grid, with at least two of the squares needing to lie in the matching quadrant. Each player in turn claims an unclaimed shape, drawing it in the same quadrant.

Pass the lead, reveal a new shape card, then do it again with one of the remaining quadrant tokens. After you use all four tokens, place the grid aside, then cover it and take the next grid. Start again with another four shape cards, trying to cover spaces not previously covered without being able to check your past work.

Sometimes you'll be confident that you've already filled a quadrant, so you'll choose two coins instead of a shape — and sometimes you'll be last in the round and have no choice but to claim two coins. Each coin you take is worth 1 point, but coins come at the cost of not marking anything in your grid, and each unmarked space at game's end is -1 point, so coins seem like a lousy deal, yet you might have no choice but to pocket the change.

The plus side of picking up pennies is that you will likely choose the first player in the next round, thereby giving you first shot at choosing a quadrant. As the rounds progress, this reward becomes more attractive, especially in round #5 when you return to your first grid and play only two more rounds. If you desperately need to plug a hole in quadrant B, then you might take coins in round #4 so that you can play first next round — or perhaps you want to let your right-hand neighbor play first in round #5 so that you can play first on the final turn, giving you greater odds of getting what you need.

That said, do you even know what you need? Have you been tracking everything, building up a mental grid turn by turn? Memory masters do exist, with the player below circling what he thought was the only space he missed after managing to cover two other empty squares on the final turn, one each in quadrants C and D. (Turns out he had missed one other square as well, but still, I'm impressed...and envious.)


On top of this, he had two coins for a final score of 0...which in most cases will turn out to be a winning score because if you choose a shape in each of the game's eighteen rounds, you'll mark a total of 72 spaces in a grid with 64 squares, which gives you little margin for error. The best score possible is 4, with you marking all 64 squares over sixteen turns and collecting coins in the other two. I haven't seen that happen in three games on a review copy, with most people sinking several steps below the X-axis. Here was my first attempt: exploded, then assembled:


11 holes and 6 coins = -5 points
In many ways, you're playing Layer Puzzle only against yourself. When you choose first in a round, you're not selecting a quadrant and shape to take away another player's ideal choice — at least I can't ever imagine that happening!

I have enough trouble tracking my own grid that I can't imagine tracking another's. At best I hear someone complain, "Ah, you should have chosen C", but what am I to make of that? If C hasn't been chosen yet that round, then they will have little to nothing drawn in that quadrant, so I don't know what they need. I need to keep my head locked on my own layers for any hope of minding the gaps.

The game includes only fifteen basic shape cards, which seems odd since you must reshuffle for the final three turns. Why not eighteen cards to avoid that? What not only nine cards so the need to shuffle at the halfway point feels more natural? The answer, of course, is mathematical: The cards feature six objects — five possible quadrominoes and two coins — and you can choose four of six items (without regard for order) in fifteen ways.

The bigger problem with the basic cards is that by the halfway point the choices become uninteresting. In one game, I filled quadrant A by picking the line of four squares four times, so I was moving successfully toward the goal, but not in an interesting way. (Any Cleveland Browns fan will sympathize: "They're running the ball again. How about that?" Not that the Browns have been moving successfully toward the goal, mind you. For an older example, turn to "One-Nil to the Arsenal".)

To ease people into the game, I recommend using four basic shape cards in the first round, then shuffling all remaining shape cards to use over the next fourteen turns.

For the full runthrough of a solo-ish game, watch this video:

Youtube Video