Peace by Peace: Succulents

We got Peace by Peace: Succulents a few weeks back at the Toy Box in San Clemente, CA on the way back from a weekend trip.  I also got the cactus-themed game "What's the Point" in that same batch, so it was an odd pair.  Two of the types of plants I used to grow back when I had space to grow things.

Anyway, Peace by Peace is not really a game, it's a series of 50 puzzles.  There is a set of 45 triangle-shaped tiles with colored leaf patterns in each corner, then a set of 50 cards giving puzzles to be solved.  Each card list which numbered tiles to use and shows a few starting cards by their number, but not what position they're in, followed by some empty spaces and possibly the colors of a few other corners.

The challenge is to work out how to complete the pattern using the tiles available.  It's a bit annoying finding those tiles to setup the puzzles, but we settled on stacking them in piles of 1-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39 and 40-45.  Then we could easily find which tiles in each stack we needed.

The puzzles are given a difficulty rating of one to five stars.  The one star puzzles are a good introduction, but after doing two of those we jumped to a 3-star and wrapped up with a 4-star challenge.  There is only one tile for each color combination, which meant only one possible solution to each puzzle.  The order of the colored corners was critical, so we quickly got in the habit of reading the open spaces clockwise, so if we needed a blue-green-red, then the blue-red-green tile wasn't going to fit.

For the more difficult puzzles, we found we could work out pairs of tiles together but keep them slightly separated from the known tiles until we eliminated other possibilities.  Or stack the two pairs of choices right next to each other and see that only one of the required next tiles actually existed, so that group had to be the right one.

It was a good puzzle solving session.  The toughest one we did only took about 15 minutes.  The 5-star ones looked like they needed more space than our cluttered table had available.