Junior Arithmancer

by Mike Spivey profile

2018

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Number of Ratings: 49
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- k42write, October 28, 2023

- biscuit, October 2, 2023

- egostat (1st Level, Abyss), September 21, 2023

- Sobol (Russia), September 5, 2023

- Ms. Woods, July 26, 2023

- thesleuthacademy, June 19, 2023

- Hikari Starshine, May 27, 2023

- elysee, April 24, 2023

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Super fun math puzzler, January 3, 2023
by Lance Cirone (Backwater, Vermont)

(Adapted from an intfiction.org review)

You are the first ever candidate in Arithmancy – a field of magic involving manipulating numbers. You are judged by the fair and impartial Morkan, the more emotive and reactive Berzia, and, most importantly, the rude and irritable Teraboz. Armed with your spell book, sheet of numbers, and list of tasks, it's up to you to win over your superiors by scoring as many points as you can.

While traditional IF can be fun, I really enjoy more experimental games as well: there's an unusual core mechanic that you have to work with, and its execution can make or break the game. Junior Arithmancer in particular reminded me of another game I really liked, Threediopolis.

The main appeal of Junior Arithmancer is that it's about manipulating numbers in surprisingly fun ways. You are given the digits of various well-known functions, such as pi, e, and gamma, and you need to reach these numbers in sequence with your spells. You can't use a spell more than once, but you can attach prefixes to certain spells to make things easier. Your accomplishments will earn you tokens that you can trade in for more spells, unlocked linearly. Once you have all the skills at your disposal, it's up to you to finish as many tasks as you can before you submit your final score.

Junior Arithmancer is a game where it's satisfying to get something right. I was intrigued by knowing what my next spell could be, and how it could help solve my problems. By the time I got them all, I just wanted to keep optimizing my techniques and returning to old sequences with new tools. Everything feels fair; the spells work consistently, the game logic is easy to follow, and you don't have to memorize any number sequences because they're all included on the sidebar. I never felt like I was lost with how the game worked.

Besides the framing device, there's a little story running through the game. Whenever you return to your exam room to trade in tokens, you'll overhear Morkan, Berzia, and Teraboz talking about the academy. Most of the story is carried by Teraboz; she feels that the test has become too easily accommodating for new people, she starts a debate over whether the word “witch” is offensive, she gets in trouble with the fearsome vice dean Merlena. Outside the story, Teraboz reacts in exasperation at your mistakes, which I thought was a fun way to tell me when I was doing something wrong. She even (Spoiler - click to show)delivers the final line of the game, quitting the academy now that you're a part of it.. Teraboz gets way more dialogue and action than the other two characters, which is a shame, because I'd have liked for Morkan and especially Berzia to have some spotlight moments.

Despite the unbalanced character focus, I'd say I liked this story more than I didn't. It's secondary to the puzzles, and even developed in an interesting direction I didn't expect. And with that said, I'd recommend Junior Arithmancer. It's a light, fun game that's easy to grasp, but hard to perfect.

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- OverThinking, August 14, 2022

- Edo, March 30, 2022

- Titania Lowe, February 27, 2022

- feamir, December 26, 2021

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Scratches an itch I can't name, November 5, 2021

I have absolutely enjoyed the experience of playing this game. I'm one of those people who likes mathematical thinking, but who hasn't been in a math class for about a decade, so this is perfect for me because it isn't prohibitively challenging as far as the sort of math you have to actually perform, but it requires you to test things out and think outside of the box as more ways to create numbers become accessible to you in the form of "spells".

There's a charming little plotline with NPCs to provide the story propping up the puzzles, but I'd definitely say this is a puzzles-over-plot game.

If you enjoy logic puzzles and growing a toolbox incrementally, this is a game you should enjoy.

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- Malasana, October 22, 2021

- twineropestringdude, May 4, 2021

- Jonathan Verso, April 11, 2021

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant game about integers, March 28, 2021
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)

In Junior Arithmancer, we play a prospective student of magic doing an entrance examination in arithmancy, which is more or less the magic of the integers. More or less: the range of numbers is restricted to a finite interval, with overflows wrapping around; and the laws of magic turn out to have a curious in-built preference for the decimal system. Anyway, during the examination we are supposed to learn and then cast spells that add, subtract, multiply, and so on, in order to create specific sequences of numbers. Meanwhile, three examiners comment on our progress.

It is really only that last element that turns the game into a fiction: the comments of the examiners form a satirical story about university politics and cast severe doubt on the wisdom of trying to enter this particular academy. (Unless we like indoor swimming pools.) It’s fun, but there’s not much here, and if someone were to complain that Junior Arithmancer is hardly interactive fiction at all… well, I wouldn’t have a principled counterargument, although I certainly could point at similar puzzle games that are part of the IF canon.

Because it’s all about the puzzles. And if you like puzzles about numbers, then these ones are glorious. They’re brilliant. At first, the aim is to use your limited repertoire of spells to get as far as possible in recreating the given number sequences. Then, as your repertoire grows, it’s all about completing the sequences. And once you have all the spells at your disposal, you have to try to optimise your solutions and solve an entirely independent set of puzzles that are all about getting to a specific end point. (And about factorisation.) It’s great fun, and I think the difficulty scales up nicely: most(?) players will be able to get to a winning ending, and diehards can try to achieve a perfect score.

I’m a diehard, and I did get a perfect score.

Junior Arithmancer is certainly not a game for everyone. You have to like number puzzles. (I won’t say ‘mathematics’, because the puzzles are not really mathematics. If I had been required to prove that a certain sequence is the only one you can solve in three moves, that would have been mathematics. Equally glorious, but a lot harder to turn into a game.) But if you do, well, Mike Spivey has prepared a real treat for you. Highly recommended.

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- Shigosei, February 15, 2021

- TheBoxThinker, January 15, 2021

- Pinstripe (Chicago, Illinois), October 25, 2020

- C4rd1n4l, September 24, 2020

- Rainbow Fire , August 28, 2020

- Sammel, July 1, 2020

- Targor (Germany), March 27, 2020


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