You can even record video of level solutions. There are over 200 built-in puzzles to solve, and you can also create your own unlimited levels to save or share with others.

Then start adding the next steps that are required to complete the puzzle, working backward from the goal if necessary. If you get stuck, I always found it helpful to hit play on the partially completed puzzle to see what will happen if you don’t add anything. Once you get into the main puzzles, there is often more than one solution per puzzle.

You can make and share your own puzzles, and there are also multi-player options. Then you continue with Easy, Medium, and Hard levels, as well as puzzles submitted by the community. You begin by playing your way through a tutorial section, which has dozens of puzzles that teach you game mechanics. Each level is different, and you use objects such as scissors, flashlights, magnifying glasses, conveyor belts, motors, pulleys, see-saws, balls, and more to facilitate goals such as releasing balloons, exploding bombs, knocking balls off the screen, turning on lights, firing rayguns, or capturing a mouse. You have a goal, and you need to arrange objects and machines to make the goal happen. If you’re not familiar with this type of game, it’s a lot like creating elaborate Rube Goldberg devices. Now Contraption Maker, made by some of the same people who worked on The Incredible Machine, carries that torch forward. I kept on the lookout for new versions of the game for my own kids to play, but didn’t find much. (I’m sure some of you out in Readerland did, as well.) I played for hours, trying to solve the included puzzles, usually succeeding. I was a young adult, probably older than the intended demographic, but I ate it up. In the early 1990s, there was a fantastically geeky game called The Incredible Machine.

Contraption maker review