IQ Knights

Dice are synonymous with luck, their very design intended to offer a random (not in the true sense of the word, pedantic readers) outcome every time they’re rolled.

It’s confusing, then, to see that the puzzler IQ Knights eschews any armoured lords or lady luck and instead uses dice for its logic-based shenanigans.

The aim of the game is to roll one or more white dice so that they land directly on the exit squares peppered around each level. The dice can only be rolled a certain number of times per turn, as determined by the number on the exposed face, with each level containing a 'par' that affects the total score.

To complicate matters, your plucky white dice are not alone in the maze. Standing in the way are black and red enemies that attack without mercy, as well as switches that can change the layout and, occasionally, chained allies that require rescuing.

Adding to all that, the player's own dice can only turn once every turn, meaning that a fair degree of forward planning is required if you don’t want the dice to end up shuffling back and forth like a ballroom-dancing zombie.

Helping gauge how to move your brave cubes around the levels, a handy 3D dice is displayed at all times below the main screen, with three sides annoyingly hidden from view.

It's made clear that opposite sides always add up to seven during the tutorial, but it’s still fairly tricky to gauge exactly which side the dice will end up landing on at the end of a long turn unless extreme care is taken when moving.

Every undo counts against your total score for the level, with restarts hammering the overall mark significantly.

The game therefore is set up to reward those who think through their movements over the trusty old fall-back method of ‘move things randomly until it works’. This is still very possible to do, however, as the individual level scores only count once the game is completed.

In fact, it’s a little too tempting on the harder puzzles to resort to random movement, as the penalty for not doing so feels too remote.

If you have a degree of self-control, however, IQ Knights is an original and tricky puzzler that should provide a decent challenge to those in search of a good maths/logic game.