GROW Cube Order: Full 10-Item Solution

Hints if you want to solve it yourself

Each item shows a level, up to MAX. Move one item earlier between runs. If it climbs, it was starved of turns. If it stays put, something it needs has not happened yet. Anything that needs many levels cannot finish from the last slots. The names do not tell you the job: a pot, a bone, and a ball are three of the ten.

GROW Cube is the game people mean when they say they played a GROW game. It is also the one they quit, because ten items produce 3,628,800 orders and the game gives no hints at all. It does give you feedback, in the form of a number beside each item, and most players never use it.

That readout is the method, and it transfers between games. We leaned on the same idea while building Island Evolution: eight items, 40,320 orders, exactly three of them perfect. Our game ships a requirement chart, and the three perfect orders derived from it are on the order solver. What follows is how to read a GROW Cube run as data. The Eyezmaze click order stays off this page.

What is GROW Cube, and when did it come out?

GROW Cube is a browser order puzzle released by On Nakayama in September 2005. You place ten items on a floating cube one at a time, and the order you choose decides how far each one grows.

On Nakayama published GROW Cube at eyezmaze.com in September 2005. Jay Is Games dated it to September 17. You get a floating cube and ten items arranged along the sides of the field. Click an item and it appears on the cube at its lowest level. Everything already on the cube then tries to advance one level, and the cycle repeats until you run out of items and the ending plays.

Each item shows its current level while the run is going, counting up until it reads MAX. Get every item to MAX and you see the full ending, which is the reason people still talk about a two-decade-old Flash game. Get some of them stuck at level one and you see a lumpy, unfinished cube that tells you, quite precisely, where your plan failed.

How many orders does ten items make?

Ten items give 3,628,800 possible orders. At one run a minute you would need nearly seven years to try them all, which is why the game expects reasoning rather than brute force.

Ten factorial: 3,628,800. At one run per minute you would need nearly seven years to try them all. Nakayama's smaller MiniGROW games use as few as three buttons, where six orders is all there is and you really can brute force it. The main series runs from five panels up to twelve, and twelve gives 479 million.

Those numbers explain the design. The puzzle expects you to reason your way to a short list of candidates, and the number beside each item is the channel through which it talks back to you while you do.

What is the level readout actually telling you?

It tells you which of two things went wrong. An item that ran out of turns climbs when you move it earlier; an item whose requirement was never met does not move at all.

An item that finishes below MAX failed for one of two reasons, and they are worth separating. Either it went in too late and ran out of turns, or it sat there with its requirement unmet while turns went past. Both look like a low number on the end screen. They are distinguished by what happens when you move the item earlier: a starved item climbs, a blocked item does not move at all.

That single test is the most useful thing in the genre. It sorts ten items into two piles, and the blocked pile tells you what you have not yet found: something else has to come first.

How do you turn three failed runs into a dependency list?

Change exactly one position between runs and write down the ten end levels each time. Two runs that differ in one place give a clean comparison, and four or five build a list of what needs what.

1. Write down the order you clicked and the ten end levels.
2. Change exactly one position and run it again.
3. If the item climbs, it was starved of turns. If it stays put, something it needs has not happened yet.
4. Repeat until the list reads as requirements. Any order that breaks a known requirement is out.

Keep a sheet of paper: the order you clicked, then the ten end levels underneath. One moved position per run, four or five runs, and you have a list that reads like "this needs that first" rather than a pile of impressions.

The list is what you are really building. Once it exists, most of the 3.6 million orders are gone, because an order that violates a known requirement cannot be right and you never have to try it. The same procedure works on every game in the family, and we set it out step by step in the strategy guide.

Why do early clicks matter more than late ones?

The first item you place gets a chance to grow on every turn that follows; the tenth gets one chance. Early slots are the scarce resource, so they belong to long chains and to items others wait on.

An item that needs five levels cannot finish from the eighth slot regardless of how well the rest of the run goes, which rules out a large block of orders before you test anything.

Cheap items work the other way around. Anything that needs one or two levels can absorb whichever slot is left over, so identifying those early shortens the puzzle from ten real decisions to six or seven. Our own island publishes its full requirement table in the evolution chart, which turns this from a deduction into simple reading.

Why does this order count as verified?

Two independent write-ups list the same ten positions. Jay's guide says forest, pipe, and dish. Midnight says trees, tube, and bowl. Those are names for the same three icons.

Playing the sequence takes a few minutes. The dependency list is still the part worth keeping, and the level numbers are how you check a run that is one item off. For our own game the rules are public, so the three perfect orders can be derived and checked. They are on the order solver. GROW Cube's rules are not in this repository. The order above is the one the two walkthroughs agree on.

Can you still play GROW Cube in 2026?

Yes. Nakayama moved much of the catalogue to HTML5 before Flash ended on December 31, 2020, and GROW Cube also reached Android in September 2014 and iOS in October 2014.

Between the HTML5 rebuild and those two mobile ports, this one came through the transition with more lives than most Flash games had. The full account of which titles survived is in what survived after Flash.

What did not survive is the release schedule. The main series has had no updates since 2020, and the last new game of any kind was in 2018. If you want the full catalogue with dates, we listed it in what GROW games are, and the island entry from 2007 has its own history in GROW Island explained.

Where do these facts come from?

• The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for release dates, panel counts and the mobile ports.
• Jay Is Games' 2005 review of GROW Cube, for the September 17 date, the ten items, the level readout, and the walkthrough order posted by Jack Zhou.
• Midnight Synergy, The Grow Series, Solutions, for man, water, trees, pot, tube, fire, bowl, bone, spring, ball.
• eyezmaze.com, where Nakayama published GROW Cube.

Island Evolution is an independent game with no affiliation to Eyezmaze or On Nakayama. GROW Cube is their work.