Regius

Believe it or not, but there are actually people who don't play games. What's more, they don't understand why anyone else does, either.

It's something of a sore point with me, given that my first wife blames the break up of our marriage on my penchant for the odd five minutes on the Mega Drive.

I still maintain that, if she could have just waited for me to pick up that final emerald, I'd have been as pleased as everyone else to welcome our first son – Knuckles – into the world.

Random Regius

Games like Regius suggest such doubters just might have a point, however.

While, on the surface, stacking up gems in a line on top of each other would appear to have much in common with almost every other puzzler out there, in practice, playing Regius feels like something of a fruitless task.

It's all a question of moves. Starting off with a random collection of jewels, Regius charges you with reordering them into matching vertical lines in just six moves.

To do so, you pick up each coloured gem – matching groups moving as one entity – and swap them with others, the idea being to stack blue jewels on top of other blue jewels, red gems on red gems, and so on.

Playing for playing's sake

The problem is, you can only move the gems at the top of each pile, meaning you'll have to do a fair bit of shifting around before you can line each colour up. It is, essentially, like a shinier, and ultimately concise, take on Solitaire.

However, while making up successful match ups in six moves is more difficult than you might think, there's scant reward on offer when you actually pull it off.

Indeed, all that tends to happen is, the playing field gets wider and more jewels are added to the pile. You carry on playing simply because, if you don't, there's not actually anything else to do.

As such, 3 Dynamics' puzzler is just a little bit too by-the-numbers to be considered truly gripping, making it hard to imagine that you'll be able to blame Regius for missing any of those life-changing events.