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What was the most confusing part? I'm not sure what more I would put in a tutorial... 

hard to get that balance right. the first 5 are trivial to teach mechanics, so those should be painfully easy. beyond that, things *ought* to ramp up. 

Heh! glad to hear somebody made it there.  I love twist endings, even if the twist isn't so big or novel. 

Wow, that is quite a score! I've had similar thoughts about 2x for odd or whatever bonus scoring rules for some levels. 

Thanks! I was worried the participants would be me, myself and I, so I'm enthused a focused jam like this worked out.  I have other ideas for focused jams I hope to put on - and also they force me to to actually start building the games I've been thinking about.

because of the long time to finish I only played lev. 1. I'm guessing the "closed" cube must come later?

I really like the way you can rotate the different faces of the cube and uncover new relationships, creating paths into dense regions that would otherwise be impenetrable. It’s a clever "twist" on Minesweeper-style deduction, and it makes exploring the board feel engaging and strategic. 

I played for about 15 minutes before realizing that, even on the easiest difficulty, I had only made a tiny dent in the overall search space. That’s part of the design, of course. At any given moment, you’re only seeing a small fraction of the full board because of all the possible rotations, which makes the scale much larger than it first appears (x8, perhaps?).

Because of that, I think it could be interesting to experiment with smaller sub-cube sizes, maybe even something as compact as 3×3, as a way to ease players into the concept or offer a shorter session option. The larger scale is impressive, but for me this feels like the kind of game I’d enjoy sitting down with for 15-25 minutes at a time, rather than committing to an hour or more to work through a full board.

And now I can see that you did in fact support long press so that's probably good enough.

I think the scarcity probably works better if you have more time to work with it. Thus it would make a lot more sense to give you more time on the later levels. As it is it's a challenge to be able to build up enough money quickly enough to be able to do interesting things with it later on in a level that's super scarce .  One thing that didn't really come through here very clearly is that it's meant to have a fast and frenetic build phrase followed by a three times more important automated phase where the game runs with whatever layout you have. That's also probably the secret as to why the rotator is useful. As is I think the automated phase is actually super brief .

This is really fun. Instantly easy to understand what's going on and clearly changes things around in a fun way period of course having played the other game in the jam with a switching and rotating mechanism maybe that's why it was instantly clear but I think probably you've just done a good job of surfacing what's going on here One thing that I would really love is a mode switch where your first click slash tap can drop a flag. This might not be immediately intuitive to you as to why you'd want it but it's because I like to play with the touch screen and on that there isn't really a right click option. For that matter the right click gesture on my touch pad isn't great either sometimes it comes through as a click and boom(!!) yoYou could also support long press to flag.

This was a fun idea. I was initially thrown off because I thought it was going to be some kind of Rubik's Cube game, but it’s really much closer to Minesweeper with an interesting mechanic that helps make otherwise impossible parts of the grid solvable.

The use of the dice dots was a great choice and really helps readability. Nice work on that. Of course, I was the one who suggested it, so I guess I’m mostly patting myself on the back, but we can call it a two-person pat :)

For me, the biggest challenge was figuring out how the mechanics worked, and that was a lot of the fun. It does make me wonder how many levels I’d play before that novelty started to wear off. But not every game needs to last forever. If you bring me something new, interesting, and novel, with a strong sense of theme, I’m happy to spend some time with it before moving on, and I think this game lands squarely in that space. Nicely done.

This is an interesting take on Minesweeper. It’s clearly not just the traditional game with a new theme or coat of paint. There are new dynamics and mechanics here.

That said, from a logical perspective, I found myself wondering how much those new mechanics actually change the underlying problem-solving. Would a veteran Minesweeper player immediately feel at home here and be able to rely on the same skills? My impression is that the answer might be yes.  However there is that whole thing about the bonfires that I could not figure out why I would want to use . Explaining that better might be the key to explaining what is truly novel here.

I do appreciate the tutorial at the beginning. It explains the basic mechanics well. But if there are more meaningful differences that make this variant unique, I don’t think they’re surfaced early enough to help the player understand what really sets it apart from the many other Minesweeper-inspired games out there.

Mind is an interesting take on the idea of what it would actually be like to search for mines, more like the real-world version of Minesweeper than the puzzle game itself. Ironically, that means the gameplay ends up being almost nothing like Minesweeper, which gives it a distinct identity.

I enjoyed wandering around and locating mines to blow up, and there’s something satisfying about the core loop. That said, I found my interest tapering off after about five minutes. It feels like there’s a solid foundation here, but I think it could use a bit more variety or progression to make longer play sessions feel more engaging. As it stands, it’s a neat concept with potential.

I think given the suspicion that multiple people have expressed that this is not really a minesweeper game at all that you're gonna have to be a bit more explicit than that to get anyone to actually bother to play the game.

One thing the game definitely doesn't have is careful tuning. Submitted 10 minutes before the deadline and I didn't realize I wouldn't be able to make changes afterwards of course the alternative would be not submitting at all oh well. I think the rotator is potentially useful in the situation where there's so many adders and multipliers there's no hope of snaking a path through all of them in which case you would have two paths or more and then they use the rotator to combine the various inputs. This would happen right at the end.  However due to the previous comment I have not had a chance to play test whether or not the cost of the rotator outweighs the benefit here. Certainly it might depend on the stage which actually is a sign of good design I think. If it doesn't ever, then bad design. ha! 

I've already fixed a number of bugs, But I'm resisting really getting in there too deeply while it's still in frozen mode for the jam so that I can integrate useful comments like yours holistically rather than being pulled one direction than the other as different points are brought up.  Such as: some people don't like the mechanic where you have fewer and fewer pipes to build with later on.

so, dev, care to fill in the part where you explain how this relates to minesweeper? 

Note I updated my description above to fix the typo relating to dragon sweeper.  

yes dragon sweeper is a frank inspiration (as I meant to acknowledge above, but managed to type the name of my own game instead, for a nonsensical mathematical concept : my game is halfway between it self and another game.  Kind of zeno's paradox in reverse).

yes dragon sweeper is a frank inspiration (as I meant to acknowledge above, but managed to type the name of my own game instead, for a nonsensical mathematical concept : my game is halfway between it self and another game.  Kind of zeno's paradox in reverse).

There are some questionable ones, yes. But I prefer more than 1 person make that judgement so I'll wait at least two confirmations that a game is outside the genre. I want to be generous to the "reimagined" aspect but eliminate spam, of course.

The submission window is closed now it's time for voting. I'm excited to see who comes out on top but I'm just as excited to see you what new variants people have created and discovered. I hope that given the smaller size of this particular jam every single entry can be rated by everyone. Realistic maybe not? a good goal? yes!!

bummer! well post it here when you do i'd love to see it even if I can't be ranked.

Ironically the design is actually opposite with fewer and fewer free pipes per level.  Ie it starts out being like pipe dream, and ends being like factorio. 

 As for the difficulty curve that was a submission mistake . I put the first version up 10 minutes before the deadline and didn't realize wouldn't be able to submit more tweaks to get the challenge right. I'm glad I left something that is playable though the other alternative might have been to have a difficulty challenge so high you can never get past the 1st level.

y'all may have seen this one since it's already popular, but this is best in show, IMHO: 

Rate Kobots by Golen for Gamedev.js Jam 2026 - itch.io

best in show:

Rate Kobots by Golen for Gamedev.js Jam 2026 - itch.io

Quite good:

Rate Conveyor Craft by curtastic for Gamedev.js Jam 2026 - itch.io

Rate RoboPuzzle by AstroCore71 for Gamedev.js Jam 2026 - itch.io

(dis) Honorable mention:

Rate Food Grade Bananas by Alan Robinson, Developer for Gamedev.js Jam 2026 - itch.io

(dishonorable because it's self promotion)

A lot of people have mentioned that. That's what the rotator is for. You can't truly merge but you can automatically switch back and forth which is roughly the same thing. And clearly that needs to be explained better . Probably the ideal thing would be to have one of the levels featuring one and then you would just see that it could potentially be useful.  In any case thanks for pointing that out as the common complaints about it helps me think more carefully about it's importance in the next version .

Yes, it was supposed to have such a curve but that last 10 minutes before launch I was still tuning and missed the window.  At least this way the zero difficulty default means people can play it as a sandbox, which I intend to keep as an option. 

ah yes that's a good workaround.

Thanks! I gave your game a try and I agree that it is a puzzle game, Or maybe a adventure game with puzzle characteristics ? heh.

The audio and visuals on this are just amazing. I felt like I was playing a comic book. As to the game I get the zero information zero manual aspect of it but I feel like there could be just a little bit more foreshadowing of which switches are available? In any case I definitely did not get off the ground!

YES, and NO. First off thank you for giving me some actual feedback that's very helpful. Second off there is a mechanism for combining its the rotator . 3rd I mistakenly launched it with trivial goals and couldn't replace it because the deadline had passed. So I pivoted to saying this is "sandbox" mode. In the end I'll probably offer both sandbox and realistic thresholds.  In order to make the later levels playable I'll almost certainly have to give the players more design time, too.

In any case, impressive score, and thanks for sharing, it give me some idea of what the threshold should be.

Thank you! I have some ideas for sure.  Getting the fluid simulation working cleanly is still a big hold up tho.

This is a unique approach to a puzzle game. It reminds me of some cognitive science experiments I've participated in, in fact. I did feel like I saw some patterns and I was doing OK. But I did eventually lose all my lives.  High marks for trying something different and spending the time to polish it nicely.

I really enjoyed the text that I saw. I even enjoy typing it, some. I would have liked a little bit more interactivity than just typing a paragraph. I must commend you on the overall styling though everything looked pitch perfect and even the plot of feeding data to the AI was somewhat plausible. This is one of those times where I love the setup more than I love the game. But I'm just not that into typing games, no criticism implied. 

I failed at somewhat unexpected times. Was that actually part of the storyline? Or just a clever cover for bugs ;-) 

Wow Buildoban Is both brilliant and requires some serious brilliance to be able to play. More than I could muster although I'm actually proud to report I did finish level three. Phew what a difficulty curve. Thanks for sharing!

What a very interesting combination of mechanics. This reminds me a little bit of building a snowman but the simultaneous movement aspect is a total game changer. I would say that the difficulty curve is really steep. I spent a very long time on Level 3. And then level 4 after maybe 10 minutes I gave up. Still that's high praise to have spent so much time on a game where I was making so little progress. If it were me I would offer some levels that are not quite so challenging. Indeed in my game that's exactly what I did. To the point that people have criticized it for being too easy so I suppose you can't make everybody happy. Some of us can't make anybody happy in fact. But you have made me happy with this game. Thank you

I was a bit stuck at first until I realized I needed to tap on the ground that's the detail that really needs to be explained to the tutorial. Once I got that it was straightforward and fun. I did feel like the head hitting level was a bit to unpredictable. That's when I decided to stop; I prefer being able to reason out what I'm trying to achieve over blind experimentation. If there had been a level skip I definitely would have tried it to see what interesting stuff came later.

Talk about being spot on for theme. And it even has a tutorial: very nice. Through mistakes that were entirely my own fault I managed to stop mid tutorial to try and restart doing things in the order it asked me to and it seems like maybe you have a persistent storage set up so that I can't get back to it? Is there an easy way to reset short of throwing away all of my itch cookies (which I'm not going to do!!)

this game is really, really good. Simple almost a fault, but in fact to perfection instead. Way to stick to your principles and deliver great platforming and puzzling with no unnecessary mechanics

My theme is "Mind vs Machine". In that it's a puzzle game featuring machines (robots).  The mind in question is yours (both the player, and the sole human character in the game). Whether or not it's "vs" is questionable. The robots *seem* to be helping you. But are they really?