GROW Island Order: Full Solution (8 Panels)

Hints if you want to solve it yourself

The panel names are the clue. Civil work lays ground, and computer engineering needs something to run on. Write down the eight end levels, move one panel, and compare. A panel that climbs was starved of turns. A panel that stays put is waiting on something else.

GROW Island is an eight-panel order puzzle On Nakayama published in September 2007. Jay Is Games dated it September 13. The Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo commissioned it, which is why the panels are named after engineering disciplines. You pick panels one at a time, and everything already placed tries to advance a level after each pick.

It is also the game we were answering. GROW Island has eight items and 40,320 possible orders. So does Island Evolution, which we built with a published requirement chart, a score you can read while the run is going, and exactly three perfect orders. Those three are listed on the order solver. They are not a GROW Island solution.

What is GROW Island, and who made it?

GROW Island is an eight-panel order puzzle On Nakayama published in September 2007. You pick panels one at a time and everything already placed tries to advance a level after each pick.

GROW Island is a browser puzzle that On Nakayama published at eyezmaze.com in September 2007. Jay Is Games dated the release to September 13. It works the way every GROW game works: you are shown a small world and a panel of items, you pick them one at a time, and after each pick everything already in the world tries to advance one level. You never aim at anything, you cannot run out of time, and the only decision you make is which item goes next.

The island itself starts as a lump of rock in the sea. Place things in a workable order and it fills in with roads, water, power and buildings until the ending animation plays. Place them badly and you get a half-built island that stopped growing several turns before the game ended.

Why was GROW Island made for a university?

It was commissioned. The Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo paid for it as promotion, which is why the eight panels are named after engineering disciplines rather than objects.

Nakayama built it as part of the JOBs section of his site rather than as a numbered entry in the main series. The eight panels are mechanical, civil, architecture, aeronautical, environmental, electrical, computer and chemical engineering.

The commission changed how the puzzle reads. In GROW Cube you are clicking a pot, a bone and a ball, and nothing about those names tells you what they do. In GROW Island the names describe real fields, so a player can guess that civil engineering lays groundwork and that computer engineering needs something to run on. Jay Is Games made the same point in its review: the descriptive names make the logic feel less arbitrary than earlier entries. The puzzle is still a puzzle, but your first guess is an educated one.

How many orders can eight panels make?

Eight factorial: 40,320. Small enough to finish in an evening, large enough that nobody finishes it by guessing — that gap is where the genre lives.

Eight panels means eight factorial, which is 40,320 orders. If you played one order a minute without ever repeating yourself, you would need about four weeks of continuous clicking to see them all. Across the series the count ranges from five panels to twelve, and twelve is 479 million, so eight sits at the friendly end.

Friendly is relative. 40,320 is small enough that people finish the game in an evening and large enough that nobody finishes it by guessing. The gap between those two facts is where the genre lives: the search space has to be reduced by reasoning before it can be searched by hand.

What makes the island setting easier to read than a cube?

Geography implies order. Water has to go somewhere, roads connect things that already exist, and tall structures need ground under them. A floating cube gives you none of those hints.

An island has geography, and geography implies order. Water goes somewhere, roads connect things that already exist, and a tall structure needs ground under it. None of that is stated in the rules of GROW Island, but all of it is true inside the game, because the artist drew a coherent place rather than a floating abstraction.

That gives you something a cube does not: a sanity check. When you suspect that panel A has to come before panel B, you can ask whether the island would look wrong the other way around. The check is not proof, and it will mislead you a couple of times, though it usually points the right way. Our own island puzzle leans on the same instinct, which is why the evolution chart exists: once you can see which item is waiting on which, the geography stops being a hunch.

How do you work out an order without a walkthrough?

Treat each run as one experiment with one variable. Write down the eight end levels, move a single panel, run it again, and compare. Three careful runs beat twenty frantic ones.

Write down what you saw. Every GROW game tells you the level each item reached at the end of a run, and that readout is the actual output of the puzzle. One run gives you eight numbers. A panel that finished at level one either went in too late or was waiting on something that never happened, and those two cases look different across two runs.

1. Write down the eight end levels after a run.
2. Move a single panel and run it again.
3. A panel that climbs was starved of turns. A panel that stays put is waiting on something else.
4. Ask which discipline the others cannot start without. That one has a claim on an early slot.

From there it is one moved panel per run, and comparing the numbers. The full procedure is in the strategy guide, and it works on any game in the family. GROW Cube is the ten-item version of the same problem.

Which panel deserves the first slot?

Whichever has the longest chain to climb, or whichever the rest of the board is waiting on. Not the one that looks most important — the first slot buys growth opportunities, not significance.

The arithmetic is simple: an item placed first gets a chance to level up on every turn that follows, while the last item gets exactly one chance. Eight panels means the first slot gets eight chances and the eighth slot gets one.

On an engineering-themed island that question has a nice shape: ask which discipline the others cannot start without. That is the panel that has earned the first slot.

The normal order and the alien-ending order are both at the top of this page. Our own three perfect orders are a different puzzle, and they are on the order solver.

What should you change after a run that nearly worked?

A run where nothing died and the score stopped moving is a good run with a scheduling problem. Something ran out of turns, which means two adjacent panels want to swap, not that the plan was wrong. Work at the end of the sequence first, since late items are the ones starved of turns.

A run where something visibly broke is a different animal. Look at what was already on the board before the thing that broke arrived, because the hostile check usually runs every turn rather than only on the turn you press the button. Our island has five distinct ways for a placement to kill something, and four of them punish an item that was already sitting there.

Where can you play an island order puzzle now?

The 2007 original still runs in its HTML5 form. If you want a current one, Island Evolution uses the same eight-item structure with a published requirement chart.

The 2007 original survived the end of Flash in its HTML5 form, but the series stopped receiving updates after 2020 and no new entries have appeared. Which titles came through and which did not is covered in what survived after Flash.

That scarcity is why people keep searching. Island Evolution is our answer to it: eight items on a deserted island, conditional growth, five ways to lose something, and a chart that tells you the rules instead of making you guess them. If you want the background to the whole family first, start with what GROW games are.

Where do these facts come from?

• The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for release dates and panel counts.
• Jay Is Games' 2007 review of GROW Island, for the September 13 release date, the Shibaura Institute commission, the eight engineering panels, and both click orders in the walkthrough guide.
• Mostly Muppet's GROW Island walkthrough, September 19, 2007, for the same normal order and the same Congratu-alien-s order.
• eyezmaze.com, where Nakayama published GROW Island.

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