Family Tree! game

Out of the blue, I found a reasonably good game app based on solving out family tree mysteries.  This is funny to me, because I did a lot of actual genealogy research in the past two months and Anne seems to enjoy watching the pieces come together.

This "Family Tree! - Logic Puzzles" game by Lion Studios Plus is fairly basic, and spams you with ads at first.  After every puzzle, you get an ad.  I don't mind paying $4.99 to get rid of ads.  Unfortunately, there are still things you have to watch an ad to unlock, which really bugs me.

Anyway, there are a few sections to look at.  In the basic game, you just click the next puzzle and try to figure out who is married to who, and where all the children go.  It starts off very simple and does get more complicated - sometimes it seems to leave out information, but just knowing X is the niece of Y is enough to get over the bump and finish the tree.  The writing is in very imperfect English in my version, but I always feel that translation glitches add to the charm.  We're living in a global society, and I can understand what they are trying to say.  Most of the puzzles feed you 3 to 5 empty spaces at a time and walk you through the rest of the tree a few at a time.

Sometimes, the way the little people are drawn is a determining factor, like "Amy's brother is an astronaut."  Yeah, THAT guy.  Or a moustache, or curly hair.  This helps add some variety to the choices.

There are challenge "boss" puzzles where there is also a time limit.  I am not a fan of time limits but the first few were easy enough.

There are custom puzzles which are really weird parodies of pop culture things, like the Star Wars family, a British Royal Family tree with all the names tweaked, a spoofed Trump family, some mangled version of the Kardashians, and more.  There was even a level where you build a tree of Greek gods which was amusing to me, since as a kid I had actually sketched lineages of various pantheons as I learned all the characters.  The language here gets pretty broken up, and makes every little connection melodramatic.

There are also daily puzzles which get really complicated.

On the main page there is an ongoing challenge to build buildings in little towns.  For each building you need some combination of people.  I don't know what that main stick-shaped currency is supposed to me.  It looks like a pet comb or a selfie stick, but Anne thinks they're supposed to be hammers.  Anyway, the people you need will cost between 2 and 6 selfie sticks each, then you can put them in a building and hit the Build button.  There is usually one other choice -- the one you really need -- that you have to watch a video to unlock, which sucks.  But it's not too hard to complete some towns along the way.

From a genealogy charting perspective, their graphs are missing some notations, like dotted lines for unmarried couples or adoptions, but I guess those are not standard and would make the charts a little too easy.

I can't say it's a great game, but kudos to the developers for making an important kind of research into a fun pasttime.  I suppose we might get faster at plugging people into real trees after a few hundred practice runs of the game