GROW Planet Is Actually GROW ver.3, the First One

Searching for GROW Planet turns up two unrelated things: a Swedish education app, and a twenty-year-old browser puzzle by On Nakayama. This page is about the second one, and the first thing worth knowing is that it is not a separate game at all.

It is GROW ver.3 under a new name. That matters because ver.3 is where the whole genre starts, and because the mechanic it introduced is still the only thing these games ask of you. If you want to try that mechanic without archaeology, Island Evolution is a current one: eight items, 40,320 possible orders, exactly three of them perfect.

What is GROW Planet?

GROW Planet is the renamed and remade version of GROW ver.3, the first game in On Nakayama's GROW series. The original appeared on February 7, 2002; the remake came in June 2009.

The shape is the one every later entry inherits. You are given a small world and a handful of items. You place them one at a time, and after each placement everything already on the board tries to advance one level. You never aim at anything, there is no timer, and being slow costs you nothing. The only decision is which item goes next.

That is the entire genre, and it has not changed in twenty-four years. What changed is the setting: a planet here, a cube in 2005, an island in 2007, a park in 2015.

Why is the first game called ver.3?

It is a joke at the player's expense. GROW ver.3 came first in February 2002. GROW ver.2 arrived in June 2006 and GROW ver.1 in December 2006 — four years after the "third" one.

The numbering has confused people for two decades, and the 2009 rename to GROW Planet was presumably an attempt to stop it confusing anyone else. It did not entirely work, because both names are still in circulation and the search results treat them as different games.

The practical consequence: if a list tells you the series started in 2002 with GROW Cube, that list is wrong. GROW Cube is September 2005. The full sequence with dates is in what GROW games are.

How does it differ from GROW Cube?

Mostly in size and in how much the game tells you. GROW Cube has ten items and 3,628,800 possible orders; the early entries are smaller and more forgiving, which is what you would expect from a first attempt at an idea.

The number of items is the single lever that sets difficulty in this genre, because the count of possible orders is its factorial:

• 3 items — 6 orders (the MiniGROW line)
• 6 items — 720 orders (GROW Park)
• 8 items — 40,320 orders (GROW Island, and ours)
• 10 items — 3,628,800 orders (GROW Cube)
• 12 items — 479,001,600 orders

Eight is the number we settled on after running every one of those 40,320 orders through the rules and counting what survived. Six is small enough to stumble into a good run; ten is large enough that trial and error stops being a strategy. The dependencies behind our eight are published in the evolution chart.

Can you still play GROW Planet?

Yes. The 2009 remake was rebuilt away from the original Flash version, and Nakayama moved much of the catalogue to HTML5 before Flash reached end of life on December 31, 2020.

That date is the dividing line for everything from this era. Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player at the end of 2020 and began blocking remaining Flash content the following month, so any page still embedding a .swf file shows nothing today regardless of browser. Which titles came through and which did not is covered in what survived after Flash.

The thing that did not survive is new work. The main series ended with GROW Park in July 2015, and the smaller MiniGROW line stopped in November 2018.

What does the first game teach you about the rest?

That your order is a time budget. The first item you place gets a chance to grow on every turn that follows; the last one gets exactly one chance.

This is true in GROW ver.3 and it is true in everything built on it since, which is why the method transfers. An item that needs five levels cannot finish from the eighth slot, no matter how good the rest of the sequence is. You can rule out a large block of orders on that basis alone, before testing anything.

The second rule is nearly as portable: somewhere in the set there is an item whose own growth depends on nothing, while several others are waiting on it. That item goes early — not because it looks important, but because everything downstream of it is frozen until it moves. The full procedure is in the strategy guide, and our own item list with what each one needs is in how to play.

Where should you start if you have never played one?

Not with the first game. Start with GROW Cube if you want the one everyone means, or with an entry whose item names actually hint at what they do.

Early entries are historically interesting and mechanically thin. The series got better at explaining itself as it went: by GROW Island in 2007 the panels were named after engineering disciplines, so a first guess could be an educated one rather than a coin flip.

If what you want is the feeling of a dependency clicking into place, the size of the puzzle matters more than its age. Ours publishes the requirement chart up front and keeps the answer to itself, which moves the difficulty from "guess what the rules are" to "work out what the rules imply" — and there are hints but no solutions if you get stuck.