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?

GROW Park is the last main-series GROW game, released in July 2015. You build a park by placing six items in an order of your choosing, and visitors arrive based on what you built.

On Nakayama released it for Android first, with iOS and PC versions following in August 2015. As in every game in the series, everything already on the board tries to advance one level after each placement, so the park you end up with is a record of the order you chose.

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. At six items there is nowhere to conceal the perfect order, so the design rewards collection instead — every order produces a different park.

In a ten-item game the perfect order is effectively secret, protected by arithmetic (3,628,800 orders), and the whole design can rest on that. Six items give a patient player a realistic shot at trying every order, so the reward had to move from finding one answer to seeing many outcomes.

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. The smaller MiniGROW line continued to GROW Thanks in November 2018, and nothing new has appeared since.

The main line runs from GROW ver.3 in February 2002 to this one in 2015. The MiniGROW entries after it were GROW Cinderella in October 2016, GROW Comeback in June 2018 and GROW Thanks in November 2018, 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?

The session got shorter. The mechanic needed no adaptation — one tap on one item — but 720 orders with something to unlock each time suits a train ride better than 3.6 million and one right answer.

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 the strategy guide. 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.

Where do these facts come from?

• The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for the July 2015 release date of GROW Park, the full title list and the November 2018 date of GROW Thanks.
• Eyezmaze's own site at eyezmaze.com, for the six items, the character collection and the HTML5 versions that replaced the Flash originals.

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