GROW Park Is the Last One. What Do You Play Now?

GROW Park came out in July 2015 and nothing followed it. Six items instead of ten, 720 possible orders instead of millions, and a cast of characters to collect instead of one perfect ending to hunt. It is the easiest game in the series to finish, and that is not an accident.

Most people who look this up have already finished it and want the next one. There isn't a next one, so we built Island Evolution: an order puzzle with eight items, 40,320 orders and exactly three that reach a perfect score. Free, in the browser, no download. The rest of this page is what GROW Park actually did, and what changed after it.

What is GROW Park?

On Nakayama released it for Android and Flash in July 2015, with browser and iOS versions following in August. You build a park by placing six items in an order of your choosing, and as in every game in the series, everything already on the board tries to advance one level after each placement. The draw is the park filling with visitors who turn up because of what you built.

The tone shifted with it. Earlier entries give you a bare cube or an empty island and one animation waiting at the end. The park gives you something on every run, so a sequence that would have been a failure in GROW Cube still leaves you with visitors you had not seen before.

How many orders do six items make?

Six factorial: 720. That is a number a person can actually attack. At a minute a run you could see every order in a long weekend, and you would not need to, because 720 orders contain a great many near-duplicates.

Set it against the rest of the family and the shape of the decision is obvious:

• MiniGROW — 3 buttons, 6 orders
• GROW Park — 6 items, 720 orders
• Island Evolution — 8 items, 40,320 orders, 3 of them perfect
• GROW Cube — 10 items, 3,628,800 orders
• The largest entries — 12 buttons, 479 million orders

Eight is the number we landed on after running every one of those 40,320 orders through the rules and counting what survived. Six is small enough that you stumble into a good run. Ten is large enough that trial and error stops being a strategy and becomes a way to spend an afternoon. Eight is where a careless guess costs you something and a careful one pays, and the dependencies behind that are in the evolution chart.

Why did GROW Park stop having one right answer?

Because 720 orders cannot hide a single solution. In a ten-item game the perfect order is effectively secret, protected by arithmetic, and the whole design can rest on that. At six items there is nowhere to hide it, so the design has to reward something else, and collection is the obvious candidate: every order produces a different park.

That trade runs both ways. You lose the moment where one dependency suddenly explains three failed runs. You gain a game that hands you something on every attempt. Which you prefer depends on whether you liked the failed runs in the first place.

Is GROW Park really the last GROW game?

It is the last of the twelve main titles, which run from GROW ver.3 in February 2002 to this one in 2015. The smaller MiniGROW line carried on afterwards — GROW Cinderella in October 2016, GROW Comeback in June 2018, GROW Thanks in November 2018 — and then stopped as well. Nothing new has appeared since, and the existing games have had no updates since 2020.

So the series did not stop at its peak. It stopped at its most approachable point, with a mobile-friendly entry aimed at people who had never played one. The full list with dates is in what GROW games are.

What changed when the series moved to phones?

Between 2014 and 2015 Nakayama rebuilt a run of the games for Android and iOS: GROW Cube in late 2014, GROW RPG and GROW RECOVERY in 2015, GROW ver.2 under the name GROW JUNGLE, and this one. GROW Park shipped for Android first and reached browsers a month later, the first time in the series that the phone led.

The mechanic took the move well, because the only input an order puzzle has ever needed is one tap on one item. What the phone changed is the shape of a session. A browser tab can expect twenty minutes and a notepad beside the keyboard. A phone expects a few minutes on a train, and 720 orders with something to unlock at the end of each fits that far better than 3,628,800 orders and a single correct answer.

We went the other way on purpose. Island Evolution runs in a browser tab at a fixed pixel size and assumes you have a few minutes and some patience rather than thirty seconds and one hand. That is probably the wrong bet commercially. It is also the only way the failed-run feeling survives.

What can a 720-order puzzle still teach you?

The mechanic is unchanged, so the reasoning still works, and a small puzzle is a decent place to watch it working. Place an item first and it gets a chance to grow on all six turns. Place it last and it gets one. Change a single position and watch which end levels move.

The only difference is that you can afford to be sloppy, and sloppy still finishes. The same method applied to a puzzle where sloppy does not finish is in how to play order puzzles without guessing. If you would rather try it than read about it, our eight items and what each one needs are set out in how to play, and there are nudges but no answers in the hints.