Columbus Discovery Download (1992 Puzzle Game)

In the puzzle-game you have to gather the pictures divided on 30 fragments placed on sides of bricks. You are allowed to rotate the group of bricks in vertical plane, to turn them over in horizontal plane, and to move them to new places. Less moves you made the higher rate you'll take. Pictures are devoted to the history of the America's conquest and must be gathered chronologically. When the picture is completed the player is "awarded" by funny music and animation.

I remember as a little pre-school child I had a few sets of blocks with pictures on them. You had to place the blocks together correctly and you could see a picture (they all had Disney motives). I was very surprised to find, that a company named Gamos (trust me, I've never heard of them before I stumbled upon this game) has made a game based exactly on such blocks. They wrapped it up in a story and thus Columbus Discovery came to be.

The premise is simple. You need to place together six pictures from Columbus' voyage to the New World. You also need to set them up in the correct order (so you can't meet the natives, if you haven't even sailed from the home port). Once a picture is finished you'll get a little animation and a comment on what the picture means. Putting it all together you get a very simplistic view of Columbus' voyage and first contact with the natives (not historically accurate, but very simplistic).

You can rotate or turn the blocks so you can see each of their six sides, and you can exchange the positions of the blocks while they're turned in a certain direction. You do all this with either the keyboard or the mouse. First you select the action (on the far left side - three coins) then you select to which blocks you'll apply those actions. Rotating and turning seem simple enough, but be careful with moving them. I suggest you only move one block at the time. Select the block you want to move (select ONLY ONE) and then right-click on the block you want to exchange it with. Otherwise you'll have a mess.

The game has nice graphics and animations at the end of the game (the little conquistador appearing in between saying you've made a good move is nothing but a nuisance), but the sound is better left turned off (you can do that by pressing S). By pressing EXIT you can return to the main menu, where you can load, save, quit or get help.

The game is quite unique and can get frustrating. Sometimes you should really take a completely different point of view to finish something, and if there is no way to finish a certain picture, then you're skipping ahead in the story and should have probably been working on another scene all along.

All in all a solid piece of entertainment, especially suitable for the younger players, but challenging enough for a single pass by anyone.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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