This is a combination puzzle game. The player has to rotate triangles around their common point to achieve the target coloring of a sphere-like 3D shape.
It is a great brain training casual game one can enjoy anywhere at any time. Whether you have only a few minutes or several hours. You don’t need to spend time “getting into” the game, but you can stay in it for as long as you like. You can always close it and then, any time later, pick it up right where you left off.
The puzzle has the icosahedron shape at its heart. It is a regular polyhedron with twenty faces, each face is an equilateral triangle, and each vertex has exactly five adjacent faces.
It is a type of combination puzzle. The famous Rubik’s Magic Cube is the most prominent representative of the combination puzzle family. It was a huge buzz in the eighties, but still remains widely known and loved. Whereas the Rubik’s Cube allows rotating entire sides, which are axis-aligned and perpendicular to each other, Magic Icos 3D works by rotating adjacent faces around their common vertex. By having multiple non-orthogonal axes of face rotation this game adds a mind-pinching twist, and remains both, reminiscent and yet very different from the cube puzzle.
It uses only two colors - white and blue, but with thousands of possible combinations, is still complicated enough to be interesting and challenging. It offers three different 3D shapes, all of which are based on the icosahedron.
* The first shape is the icosahedron itself.
* The second shape is classified as the great dodecahedron, but has the same edge arrangement as the icosahedron. This version of the puzzle is closely related to the Alexander's Star puzzle, but uses binary coloring and thus is still quite different.
* The third shape is derived from the icosahedron by subdividing its faces into more faces. The coloring remains the same, but the extra faces make the transformations work on parts of the colored regions, rather than the entire regions.
If you like intellectual challenge or maybe are mathematically inclined, this game is for you. It trains spatial, geometrical and abstract thinking, while letting you pass the time in an enjoyable and useful way. Are you waiting to board a plane, a train or a bus in a few minutes? Are you already in a transport? See if you can advance the puzzle by making a few more moves, maybe even solve it completely!
These geometrical structures are easy to understand and manipulate, but are far from trivial to get into a specific state.