Three Little Piggies is a new SmartGame I designed specifically for preschool children (age 3-6). I always love to design for little kids, because it allows me to focus even more on simplicity than I normally do. You don’t need hard challenges or a complex mechanical solution to impress young kids. All you need is a good idea. Something that fascinates children. And luckily, the younger children are, the more they are still fascinated about all kind of small things that adults find normal. HOME SWEET HOME The idea was to make a puzzle game where characters are hidden. I already explored this concept with Safari and Pirates, but those games are too hard for children of age 3. Once they have hidden something underneath a puzzle piece, they “forget” that it’s there. This means that when they can’t solve a challenge, they think that probably the last puzzle piece was placed wrong, although it might have been the first puzzle piece. To solve this issue, I didn’t wanted to hide characters completely, but keep them a little visible. For that purpose, each puzzle piece features a house. Even when the character is hidden inside a house, it’s still visible through the windows. To keep things solvable for very young children, I limited the number of puzzle pieces to 3, beating my previous record in minimum number of pieces. Maybe next year I will try to come up with a logic puzzle with only 2 pieces.
