Zen Blocks

4th November 2004

Legacy warning: this is a very old script, and may not work correctly in your browser, if it works at all.

Zen Blocks is a visual puzzle, where you re-arrange a maze of rectangular blocks within a tightly confined space, so that a randomly moving object can escape.

The game is written using SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) - to play it you will need the Adobe SVG Viewer, and any compatible browser (with javascript enabled):

There are four levels to the game, which you can also play individually:

  • Level 1 (fairly easy)
  • Level 2 (fairly hard, but not too bad)
  • Level 3 (very hard)
  • Level 4 (extremely hard, although you may not think so at first..)

How to play

The playing area is an 18x10 checkerboard, with a single red dot moving randomly in the free space between many larger rectangular blocks. The object of the game is to clear a path between the blocks so that the red dot can get to the bottom right-hand corner, and escape.

You move the blocks by dragging them, but only in their longest direction: tall blocks can only go up and down; wide blocks can only go sideways. You can move a block more than one square at a time, if there's room.

Your overall objective is to free the red dot in as few moves as possible - there's no time limit, just the number of moves, which is shown at the top right-hand corner of the playing area.

Compatible browsers

The game will work in Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer using Viewer 3.0, or in Firefox and other mozilla browsers using Viewer 6.0 beta (although the blocks might leave rendering artifacts when you move them). The game is written specifically for the Adobe plugin and won't work in either of the native SVG implementations currently available:

  • Opera 8 has native support, but it doesn't implement the SVG DOM (Opera uses the the Tiny 1.1 profile, a lightweight version designed for mobile devices).
  • SVG-enabled mozilla builds do have the necessary DOM support, but not enough of the filters and visual effects.

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