This past weekend I was stuck in the house with a bad case of the sniffles so it was a good thing I had my trusted PlayBook and BlackBerry by my side while confined to bed. So I decided to spend some quality time with my favorite tablet and see what puzzle games out there could keep me occupied during my convalescence. Lo and behold I found a pretty fun game that also happens to be FREE. Also available on the Android platform, RuniK by Mathieu Heyd is a fresh take on the old Bubble Breaker game that takes advantage of the PlayBook's 7" screen to bring you hours of mind boggling fun.
Not going to lie to you, gameplay is rather simple and easy to pick up. The basic premise is that you need to match or collect as many same-colored runes, or blocks, as you can to clear the board. Any leftover blocks turn to stone, aka disabled runes, which restricts playing room but are freed when you match neighboring blocks and go back into play. Play continues until the board fills with disabled runes and there are no more possible moves. Super Runes appear at the bottom and correspond to one of the colors on the board and when they are fully charged have two purposes: one they make sure the points you collect from a group of that color are increased, and, two, when used it wipes the screen of that rune in case you're stuck at the top with no way out.
What's so daunting is where do you begin? There's the logical way of matching small clusters of two or three to form larger groups to collect more points, or the fun way of just tapping the first ones you see. If you ask me this is very frustrating when deciding your next move. Now while this may be a simple game, the graphics are vibrant and it is very addicting. Does it make me grab my PlayBook and spend time trying to advance through each level to the point where it goes from four colors (red, blue, green, and yellow), to the max of six (purple and light blue)? Yes. I only wish it had a leaderboard so I could track my high scores. If you have some time on your hands and are looking for a way to relax with a challenging puzzle game then this is definitely for you.
More information / screenshots and to download RuniK