Game Within a Game: Nonograms & Ladders

We have been playing some of those old Nonogram apps before bed lately.  Way more than we should, but I guess once you do ten levels, you might as well do 50 of them, right?

Anyway, I like any kind of bonus levels that have a game within the game, and Nonogram.com currently has a "Rise & Dice" game in rotation which is essentially Snakes & Ladders.  You gain dice by playing the regular puzzles and have to get up to space 200 to win the mini-game challenge for the week.  It's a good little no-brainer.  Your overall progress against other players is shown in the tiny top bar, and you roll and go up ropes and fall down throuh portals.  There are tiny gift boxes on some spaces that give you 2-3 more dice.  When you win any daily or weekly challenge, the Nonogram.com app gives an attractive trophy for your shelf in the main game.





We have each beaten it a few times.  It's kinda fun mumbling the die roll needed to avoid the traps and get to the next upward link, only to fail and roll other numbers most of the time.

I know a high percent of the gaming crowd thinks roll-and-move games are dumb.  On an app, where it's just tapping a button over and over, yeah, it's not top tier gaming.  In person, the social enjoyment of even a "lowly" chutes & ladders game is not easily dismissed.  Maybe we don't all want to be doing massive calculations and stacking tons of resources, or building tricky decks with paragraphs of rules on every card.  Sometimes "roll, move, and laugh at the crap that happens" is the perfect therapy.

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