The Tile Game

I was on a computer playing a game.  It was an advanced and meaningful interpretation of a long-time standard game. In the plastic game of my youth it was a tile game where there were 12 or 16 tiles, usually white, in a square that you would push around to make a complete puzzle. There was always one empty slot to give room to maneuver the tiles about. The tile games that I was most familiar with were word puzzles.

What I was playing was a much larger puzzle using a computer interface and seen on a monitor. It was a puzzle of perhaps fifty tiles.  Each wooden tile had an ornate carving. It was shown to me by an observer to my play that even though I was on a computer and looking into the monitor the tiles were to be moved by touching them physically and sliding them the same as I had done in my childhood days.  The fellow showing me this used a straightened out paper clip to nudge a tile to the side. 

There was purpose behind the game far beyond the challenge of placing tiles together in a sorted order; this became clearer to me on an intellectual and emotional level when first my helping friend showed me the movement of the game. Many of the tiles were animals. When the tiles were shoved tightly to a matching tile they would form a more complex and unusual picture. Occasionally an unknown solution would arise, as once with a fish tile that I put next to another tile, the fish was then hidden.

It seems that it was a learning game about the complexities of nature and how a fish next to an elephant for instance may mean certain advantages or disadvantages to the animals.  It appears that the puzzle also had the concerns that face us now such as that of habitat and pollutants. I did not get a chance to learn more of the full potential of the game as other concerns took front and center later that evening.  I wish only that I could return to the play and learn what was offered.