Color Wheel
Color Wheel Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Equipment
- The Wheel Board
- All 90 Pyramids
Overview
Color Wheel is a solitaire/cooperative game. The ten-sided board is populated with a mixed-up arrangement of pyramids, and you have a limited number of moves in which to rearrange the pieces into groupings of each color.
Goal
Move all the pieces on the board into clusters of the same color — kinda sorta like solving a Rubik's Cube.
Setup
Separate the seven colorful sets of pyramids (red, yellow, orange, green, cyan, blue, and purple) from the grayscale pyramids (black, white, and clear). Randomly populate each space of the Wheel with one of the colorful pyramids. Do this by grabbing pieces without looking at them and placing them on empty spaces. Make sure that each piece you add is of a different color than any in the spaces that share a side with that space. Also, be sure to choose pieces of all three sizes as you go. Place the remaining 23 pyramids in the bag or the box; they will not be used. Once the board has been populated, prepare the Scoring Track by spreading out the grayscale pyramids next to the board, with each one flat.
How to Play
You may change the arrangement of the board in two ways, either by swapping any two pieces that are the same size, or by swapping any two pieces that are the same color. Most of the time, same-size pieces are swapped, but now and then same-color swaps are needed to get pieces into the desired positions.
Piece Grouping
Pyramids must be clustered such that all the pieces in each color-cluster are next to another of the same color. Note that "next to" only includes full-edge connections; corner-connections and across the board connections don't count.
Scoring Track
The grayscale pyramids are used to track your number of moves. They all begin lying flat; whenever you swap pieces on the board, you must also stand up a grayscale pyramid. When all of these pyramids are upright, the game is over. Even so, you can continue to measure your performance by reversing the scoring track, flattening the scoring pyramids as extra turns are taken, to see how far over "par" you went.
How to Win
Rearrange all the pieces on the wheel so that all are clumped together into contiguous groups of the same color, within 27 moves.
Other Notes
Solo Style
Some players will always prefer to "go it alone," trying to solve the puzzle without anyone else's help. Even then it's a good idea to have someone else involved, specifically keeping track of the score for you, since it's easy to forget to keep track of each move yourself when you're "in the zone."
Cooperative-Style
To play as a group, players can simply take turns in order, each making a single play, or you can go free-style, with anyone jumping in with a good move as soon as they see one. A nice compromise is for a player to call out a move they think is a good one, and after making it, wait until someone else has gone before jumping in again. You can call a move by saying "Large yellow here," for example, pointing to a specific spot, indicating that you'll move a Large yellow into that location, with either a single move or a two-move swap.
Timer-Style
Another way to play is to measure your performance with a timer. Instead of counting moves, simply race to rearrange the wheel using a stopwatch to track your speed. You can try to beat your personal best time, or you can challenge another competitor to beat your time, using the same set of randomly-chosen pyramids to set up the board. (Exact duplication of the random starting configuration is not necessary.)
Head-to-Head Style
Players can compete head-to-head, either against the clock as already noted, or by seeing who can solve the puzzle in the fewest moves.
Rainbow Style
If you'd like to increase the challenge, play with the added requirement that the colors end up in a ROY G BIV sequence (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Light Blue, Dark Blue, Purple).
Escape-Room Style
Just to make sure everyone's fully engaged, I like to imagine we're all trapped in a puzzle chamber by some evil villain. If we don't finish before the timer runs out, poison gas fills the room and we all die! So focus, people, please! We only have a few moves left!