Genie Quest — Play Free Online

Genie Quest is a line-drawing puzzle with a lamp-and-wish theme. Each board is a grid with pairs of matching lamps scattered across it, and your job is to link every pair with a path before your moves run out. It is a quiet, thinking game, which makes it a change of pace from the bouncing and reflex tests that fill most of this site.

A session is a string of short boards. You study the layout, work out which routes have to cross which squares, and commit. Early boards are gentle. Later ones are tighter, and a careless first connection can wall off a pair you needed to reach later. The game is by Narenjo, a French developer, and was published on Poki.

If you came to Doodle Jump for the "just one more try" feeling, you get the same pull here, but from solving a layout instead of timing a jump. It runs in the browser with nothing to install.

How to play

On a computer, the mouse does the work: press the left button on an item and drag to draw the connection, then release. Keyboard movement keys are listed with the game too, but the mouse is the natural way to play. On a phone or tablet you tap and drag with a finger.

Join each lamp to its match with a line. Lines cannot share squares, so every path you draw takes space away from the others. A board is finished when every pair is connected, and you have a limited number of moves to do it.

Tips

• Look at the whole grid before the first drag. Pairs that sit in corners or against an edge have few possible routes, so connect those first.
• Take the shortest sensible path when you can. A long, wandering line eats squares that another pair may need.
• Count your moves against the number of pairs. If you are running short, undo your thinking rather than rushing the last few connections.
• When a board gets stuck, find the pair that is now blocked and work backwards to the line that blocked it.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

Fireboy and Watergirl is the closest relative on the site for puzzle fans, since it also rewards planning, though it adds platforming and a second player. Ovo 2 and OvO game are precision platformers that test your reactions and timing, which Genie Quest does not. Day D Tower Rush and Bloons Tower Defense 2 are strategy games where you place defenses, so they are a good next step if you like thinking ahead.

Genie Quest suits short breaks, since a board takes a few minutes, and it works about as well on a phone as on a laptop.