X-marks-the-spot
Sneaky-Pete the pirate has discovered a long-lost map indicating sunken treasure in the shallow-waters close to treasure-island. Help Sneaky-Pete navigate to X and recover the sunken booty! He will need to position a strong wooden raft exactly on X to succeed.
But beware, the shallow waters are dangerous, so Sneaky-Pete must stay safe and dry. He can step freely between adjacent rafts and islands and can propel any raft in a straight-line (north, south, east or west) as long as there is something to aim for and anchor against (head-on or side-on).
Update November 2023: The full collection of X-marks-the-spot puzzles are now available in puzzlescript-plus. If you prefer the PS UI or simply can't get enough of all that retro pixel artwork just head right on over to... clickmazes.itch.io.
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Goal
Guide the pirate to (X) to recover the hidden treasure. The pirate must use the islands and rafts to move around.
Controls
Click on the grid to move the pirate. The pirate will
move towards the click, if it is safe to do so.
Puzzle pack selector:
Puzzle encoding:
Move sequence:
Shortcuts
- Disable alerts:
- Enable cursor-keys:
- Reveal dev-panel:
Puzzle design notes
This puzzle concept originated in a set of puzzles called ConTact3 designed by Bob Henderson (USA) in 2012 and first featured on the zillions-of-games website in 2014. ConTact3 was the fourth variant in a range of puzzles all centered on the contact mechanic, where a cell could only be moved if it had at least one neighbour. All cells were potentially mobile cells (aka rafts) and were only locked-down when isolated. ConTact3 introduced the concept of an active 'baton' (aka pirate) that meant only one group of cells could be mobile at a time. The original puzzle sets featured goals in one or both of the SE/SW corners and included zero, one, and two red cells (aka wood rafts).
Only a handful of ConTact3 puzzles on the 5x5 grid (or smaller) existed until this new set was developed in late 2020. Varying the goal location (X) and introducing two types of new fixed cells (safe islands and blocking whirlpools) significantly increased the scope of the puzzle-space resulting in both improved variety and deeper complexity on smaller grids, ultimately allowing us to focus solely on the results for the 4x4 grid leaving 5x5 aside (for now).
The puzzle collection above is a mix of hand-crafted and curated computer-generated puzzles supplied by Bob Henderson. Bob's search algorithm finds puzzles that maximise the number of raft moves for each given grid configuration. For this reason almost all puzzles have a unique signature in terms of artifacts on the grid (wood-rafts, grass-rafts, islands, whirlpools and X-marks-the-spot locations). The harder puzzles typically require 20 or so raft moves, with a handful in the range 40+.
ConTact3 concept - © Bob Henderson - 2012
Puzzle designs - © Bob Henderson & Andrea Gilbert - 2014-2021
HTML5 implementation - © Andrea Gilbert - 2021
puzzlescript plus implementation - © Andrea Gilbert - 2023
puzzlescript plus fork - maintained by Tom Hermans (Auroriax)