Somewhere in the summer of 2020 - you know, the first plague year - I was terribly bored and had nothing to do because no one did and I decided to play a game that was kicking around my Steam library for a while, one I heard good things about. It's name was Zoombinis, a remake for modern machines of an older game, entitled The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I played it that first time for maybe thirty minutes, and I stopped. I knew I had to talk about it.
The original title - The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis - is no misnomer. The game originally meant for children is an edutainment game sure, but not in the traditional sense of testing math facts before treating the kid to an arcade game level - or the worse sense of some bastardized mix of quiz and game. I can not count how many games I seen that are just slower, far less fun Galaga where the enemies you shoot are just multiple choice answers.
In Zoombinis, the game is the learning. After making your intrepid band of zoombini adventurers, you set out on a journey to find them a new home. Each "level" is an obstacle in their way, a sort of logic puzzle based on some part of the game world. Sometimes you have to figure out some sort of unspoken sorting rule to your zoombinis, like if certain paths only allow zoombinis with certain hair or feet to pass. Carefully designing your zoombini squad can make these much easier than they could be otherwise. Other times, you have to recognize patterns in the game world or on some puzzle device in order to overcome obstacles - finding the right things to move or manipulate in order to pass. The whole game is about having kids practice what math - professional math - really needs, things like pattern recognition and different kinds of reasoning and crativity, over things like rote memorization.
Not only did the game capture in a really fun way the things that are most important, and what I like the most, about math - but a lot of the puzzles were effectively math puzzles in their own right. Sorting zoombinis based on some rule can be thought of as a set theory problem - figuring out what boxes which zoombinis go into. Making pizzas to appease an angry troll is a logic problem, figuring out how to deduce what he wants in as few steps as possible. One of the latter levels I remember is just about you creating your own algorithms, your own instructions to make your happy zoombinis walk like lemmings from one end of a gorge safely to another. I wanted to share that with people. So, a few nights I stayed up late, set up a microphone, and talked while I played the game to explain to people the math going on in front of them that the colorful characters helped sugarcoat.
There were four videos, one for each block of three puzzles. A playlist is below. It was fun to talk Zoombinis with people, and I hope to do so again in a somewhat better way in the future.