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Put away your Rubik’s cube and leave your jigsaw puzzle in the cabinet. Walk into the 21^st Century and enjoy the almost perfect digital marriage which is Lost Qubixle. The app combines patience breaking reconstruction, brain crushing logic and the anxiety of getting everything done in the nick of time.

What Is It?

Qubixle is a collapsed star which needs to be reconstructed with as few elements as possible by you along with your assistant, the robot Qubie. Unfortunately, since Qubie has a “bad memory”, 99% of this reassembly work gets deferred to you. Your rebuilding is rated in one of three ways – Correct, Minimal and Quick. A star is given if each rating is satisfied. With dozens of boards contained within several difficulty levels, at least once star rating is required to advance to subsequent boards. At the minimum, a Correct rating is required to advance.

Game Play

Each board starts with an empty grid. Three views of this grid are given to you at the top of the screen – Front, Left and Top. Tapping on any of these view icons will automatically orient the grid to that view.  Each view displays a specific numbers of gray boxes pertaining to points on the grid which lets you know where to place the elements. These gray boxes will turn green once the elements are placed correctly.  It is not as simple as just placing elements however on the grid however. Elements can be stacked, so you may have to stack elements in order to get those gray boxes to turn green. With sixteen points on the board and stacks as high as four, a lot can go wrong!

Elements are placed simply by pointing to the area on the board you wish to put them in. Tapping and holding an element will remove it from its place. There is also an undo button in the lower right corner which will help you reverse through steps. Placing elements in wrong areas will bring up red boxes in the display views. Wrong areas can include places where gray boxes are not positioned in any of the display views, or they can appear if you stack items too high.

Salt In The Wound

You will have to switch from view to view to ensure proper placement of elements. However, once everything has been satisfied and you have green boxes in all three display views, you still aren’t finished. You are required to have stars constructed with as few elements as possible. This means possibly removing elements from the bottom and sides of stacks so that their positions remain consistent with what you see in the display views. A lot of thought as well as trial and error have to go into this. Removing the wrong elements will cause boxes to turn back to gray, so proceed with caution.

You have five minutes on the clock for each board. If you can reconstruct qubixles in less than two minutes with a minimal number of elements, you will gain the all three star ratings. Get it done in more time than that and you will acquire only the “Correct” and “Minimal” ratings. If you just place items in their correct positions, you will only get the “Correct” rating. You can let the clock run out in the latter scenario. As we mentioned before, “Correct” is the minimum for advancing to the next board.

Verdict

Qubixle is a lot to swallow. We had to go through the tutorial several times to truly understand the overall concept, particularly with respect to the minimal aspect of reconstruction. Once we got it though, time started flying by. The game is challenging, fun and as we said earlier, a real brain crusher. We suggest that you really take your time with the interactive tutorial which guides you through reconstructing a basic Qubixle to get the hang of things. Understand how the different views changes the perspective of the board, and even redo completed boards to really get the hang of the minimal concept.

We foresee this game becoming a huge hit. It is like the 21^st century digital version of the Rubik’s cube, but more challenging. At $1.99, it is worth every penny.