Daniel wrote another computer game for another contest!  “The Sand Boxes” is accessed by clicking the icon with a picture of a wooden Inca face (also, the title pops up when you roll your mouse over the icon) on the contest page.

This game has graphics and is shorter than Daniel’s previous game, “Ka”.  It takes about half an hour to play.  In “The Sand Boxes”, you are trying to rescue a trapped archaeologist by finding and opening puzzle boxes with sliding parts, to find the golden keys, one of which will open The Mountain’s Mouth.

I’d say anybody over about 8 years old who has some patience with puzzles would enjoy this game.  Our 5-year-old had some luck with it but not enough logic/persistence to solve some of the puzzles–for example, if he’d already tried moving a piece without success, he wouldn’t try that piece again even after moving another piece and creating a space next to it.

These puzzles move using very realistic physics.  There’s even a combination lock!  It’s annoying to turn with your mouse, but it does work exactly like a real combination lock.  (And I carefully decoded the numbers of the combination from the place where they are encoded, only to realize as I spun the lock that Daniel had used the actual combination from the padlock he photographed, which is mine!  I haven’t used it in a while, but I might have remembered the combination–I certainly recognized it–so that was an odd moment, finding my lock in an archaeologist’s camp in Peru!)