Ecosystem Puzzle
Grow a food chain, then keep it fed.
Spring
Stones are rare and growth keeps well.
×1
The meadow is full
Score 0
The chain
- Sprout
- Grass
- Rabbiteats grass
- Foxeats rabbits
Grow a food chain, then keep it fed.
Score 0
Your hand always holds one tile. Tap any empty square to put it down. That is one turn.
Three of the same tile, touching side by side, become the next living thing: sprouts make grass, and grass brings a rabbit. Rabbits are the exception — two of them together are enough to draw a fox.
Growing things scores nothing. Points come only from an animal eating what is beside it — and a fox eating a rabbit is worth five times a rabbit eating grass. Feed several animals on the same turn for a multiplier.
An animal only eats once its bar is red. Until then it leaves everything alone, so grass can sit beside a rabbit and be built into the next rabbit in peace. You are never asked to keep food away from your own animals.
The bar under a tile is how much time it has left. An animal that is not fed starves into bones; grass nobody came to graze goes to scrub. Either way the square is out of play — so a fox is not a trophy, it is a mouth you have to keep feeding.
A stone works its way up onto an empty square on a steady beat. It never touches anything living — it takes the room you were going to use. Stones are the reason a run ends at all.
When something grows up beside dead ground — bones, scrub or stone — one of those squares comes back to life. One per growth, so you cannot merge your way out of a mess in a single move, but nothing is ever permanent either.
A turn resolves growth first and feeding second, so the tile that completes a merge is never eaten. Handy when a starving rabbit is about to take the grass you needed: finish the patch right beside it and the grass becomes a rabbit — and a fox, if it lands next to another rabbit — before anything gets a bite. The dashed orange squares mark what a starving mouth will take next turn.
The strip above the board is the season. Spring is gentle — stones are rare and growth keeps for ages — and each season the stones come faster and plants fade sooner, until winter, where the ground is hard and nothing lasts. In exchange, every meal is worth more: ×1 in spring, ×4 in winter. Most runs end in winter, and that is where a score is really made. The animals' own clocks never change, so the red-bar rule always means the same thing.
Once every square is taken, that is the run. There is no final level and no last animal to reach — only how far into the year you can keep the chain turning, and how much it ate on the way. Beat your own best.