Tutorial Contest Entry 6

NB - This entry was received after the deadline

So you’ve jumped aboard a ship to battle brigands and win their Poe, and the captain of the vessel has ordered you to man the sails! And all yer brain can think is, “YAR! I have no clue what they want me to do!” Well a brief walk through the art of the Sailing Puzzle will get you handling the mizzen mast and riggings like a seasoned buccaneer in no time! First, let’s take a look at the pieces that you’ll be trying to fit into the puzzle. These pieces come in just these 9 color combinations, and must be fit into the matching colored boxes on the puzzle screen. The puzzle screen contains various colored patterns of the receptacle boxes for the puzzle pieces, and may be completed individually or as part of a chain. Notice that you use the arrow keys to move and rotate the pieces into place. And the spacebar allows you to speed up the descent of the pieces into the puzzle. Learning to quickly fill the puzzle color patterns will keep your speed indicator flying at full speed. Also, notice that there are obstacle blocks within the puzzle that can be eliminated. Hint – Eliminating these blocks early on can make building chains, and eventually completing the puzzle screen, much easier. As with all of the puzzles in YPP, the bigger the chain you can build, the faster you complete the puzzle and the more productive you are for your crew. So let’s look at how a cascading chain might be built to get you a triple the next time you sail. We’ll use the same screen you saw before to demonstrate how to build a chain. In this example, a three-tiered chain has been set up by our player. T more easily show you how the chain will work, two balls and two holes have been labeled. The final piece – a white-blue piece – is ready to be set in place atop its colored section on the puzzle. It will complete the first portion of the three-tiered chain. When the first portion is completed, the small brown connectors on the pieces involved in that color pattern will release from their partner pieces, allowing the balls not used in the puzzle to fall downward. The yellow ball labeled with an ‘A’ will release from its partner and fall into the hole labeled ‘1’, completing the second portion of the chain. The blue ball labeled ‘B’ will fail on top of it temporarily. But when the second portion of the chain is completed and disappears, Ball ‘B’ will fall into the blue hole labeled ‘2’. When it does, the third part of the chain is completed and your sailing indicator will immediately show the results. ''Hint – As you work toward building bigger and bigger chains, a combination of four colored balls that fall on each other that are not part of the colored combinations count toward your chain. However, they do not help advance or maintain your speed indicator as much as the combinations that complete the colored patterns.'' As you progress in the sailing puzzle, you will receive more and more colored patterns to fill and additional obstacle blocks to work around or eliminate.