Guardians

Guardians is a French puzzle game from 1991, and the hardest thing about it is explaining how it is actually played — which in this case is both a compliment and a warning. Reflexes barely come into it; this is spatial planning of a kind gaming history has rarely attempted.

You take the role of a guardian whose job is to contain the so-called Triffids — balls of pure energy drifting around the playfield. Your tools are blocks in five colours: you slide them freely around the top-down board and build walls out of them to pen the Triffids in. The catch is that the moment two blocks of the same colour touch, they fuse into a so-called cohesion and can never be moved again. One careless placement can irreversibly wreck a plan that took minutes to set up.

The boards are not empty, either — they come riddled with holes and obstacles you must build around. The result has been compared to a cross between Tetris and origami: the rules take a minute to learn, but folding everything into place turns out to be an unexpectedly demanding discipline.

Let us be honest: Guardians is a game for a narrow audience. It is slow, abstract and capable of real frustration, because a mistake made at the start of a level only catches up with you at its end, when nothing can be undone. It is also a true original — the irreversible colour-fusing mechanic has hardly been repeated since — and anyone who likes logic games off the beaten track should give it an evening.

You can play it on oldgame.cz directly in the browser, no installation needed.