GROW Race Game: Can You Play It, or Only Watch?
In short
- GROW Race is a 2 minute 33 second video Eyezmaze posted on May 13, 2021. There is nothing to click and no score.
- Eyezmaze calls it the final form of GROW RT, a scene that followers evolved through nine Twitter polls.
- Each poll picked one of two panels, so the crowd steered a branching story and never had to set an order.
- If you came to play, Island Evolution is a free browser order puzzle in the same tradition.
Search for GROW Race and the top two results are a page in the Eyezmaze archive and GROW Island, a 2007 Eyezmaze game that has nothing to do with our Island Evolution. So people click expecting something to play. What loads is a YouTube player, and the page explains it in one sentence and two links.
We followed both links and went through the video's storyboard, one frame every two seconds. This page covers what GROW Race is, the Twitter experiment it finished, the full vote tally from the Eyezmaze archive, and where to go if you wanted something to play. We make Island Evolution, a browser order puzzle inspired by the GROW series, so that last part is ours.
What is GROW Race?
GROW Race is a short video from Eyezmaze, the site and channel of GROW creator On Nakayama. It was uploaded to YouTube and the Eyezmaze archive on May 13, 2021, runs 2 minutes 33 seconds, and is titled "GROW Race (Try to guess who will win!)".
The archive entry is two sentences long. It says the video is the final form of GROW RT, an event held on Twitter. The words GROW RT link to an Eyezmaze tweet from March 2021, and a second link goes to a longer archive page about the event.
The video itself is a race with no player input. Seven racers, most of them on wheels, one on a unicycle and one on a scissor lift, wait behind a START line for a countdown. The course runs past a pond, through a maze seen from above with keys, coloured switches and a REPAIR sign, and down a long straight where LEVEL UP labels pop over the racers as they change shape. Near the end two of them leave the ground entirely. It finishes at a GOAL post and an END card, and we will leave the winner to you.
Can you play GROW Race anywhere?
No. The official page embeds a YouTube video and nothing else. There is no browser build, no app and no download, and GROW Race is absent from the published list of GROW titles.
The Wikipedia list of the series stops at GROW Thanks in November 2018 and notes that no new games have appeared since 2020. GROW Race came out in 2021 as a clip, which fits both facts.
The titles you can still play are covered in what survived Flash, and the whole catalogue is laid out in the GROW series guide.
What was GROW RT on Twitter?
GROW RT was a GROW scene that followers evolved by vote. Each post offered two panels, the one with more votes was applied, and retweets unlocked the next level. Eyezmaze documented it on a page dated December 31, 2020.
The rules, as the archive states them, were short. Every post showed the current scene with two panels under it. People voted, the winning element changed the scene, and the retweet count decided when the next level opened. That target climbed as the scene grew: 10 retweets at level 1, 50 at level 4, 120 at level 7 and 150 at levels 8 and 9.
The first scene was a pale blue blob on a white background. By level 9 it had become a crowd of small eared creatures on a pink disc. A row of icons across the top of each panel records every winning pick so far, which is the same bookkeeping a GROW game does with its item bar.
How did the nine GROW RT votes go?
Turnout peaked at 1,104 votes on level 2 and fell to 393 on the last poll. The closest race was Lever against Door at level 6, 51.4% to 48.6%, which was about two dozen votes.
| Level | Winner | Loser | Votes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hand, 59.8% | Leg | 1,032 |
| 2 | Meat, 52.8% | Water | 1,104 |
| 3 | Sea, 58% | Mountain | 638 |
| 4 | Moon, 73.9% | Sun | 797 |
| 5 | Enlarge antenna, 62.6% | Enlarge fur | 749 |
| 6 | Lever, 51.4% | Door | 812 |
| 7 | Egg, 56.9% | Treasure box | 788 |
| 8 | Battery, 56.7% | Fire | 476 |
| 9 | Sportsmanship, 61.6% | Battle | 393 |
Moon over Sun was the only landslide. Most polls landed between 52% and 62%, so a few dozen people changing their minds would have sent the creature somewhere else.
The final poll put Sportsmanship ahead of Battle, and the finale Eyezmaze posted that May was a race. Eyezmaze does not draw the link, but it is hard not to read the race as the Sportsmanship ending.
No poll, no retweet target In Island Evolution all 8 items are yours from the first turn. You pick every one, the island grows after each placement, and the score out of 27 is yours alone.
▶ Read the one ruleHow is GROW RT different from a GROW order puzzle?
Every GROW RT poll threw one option away for good. A GROW game keeps every panel and asks only when to use each one, so the puzzle there is the sequence. GROW RT asked which branch to take at each step.
In GROW RT none of the nine pairs repeated. Water lost at level 2 and was never offered again, and the same went for Leg, Door and Fire. Nine choices between two options give 512 possible paths through the polls, and the crowd walked down exactly one of them.
A GROW game works the other way. You get the full set of buttons, every one is used, and the order decides whether each piece grows. That is why the numbers get large so fast: eight items can be arranged 40,320 ways, and in our game only 3 of those reach the perfect score. If you have only met GROW through GROW RT, the older GROW Cube is the clearest example of an order puzzle in the series.
The nine GROW RT panels on the archive page each show a level number and a retweet target. None of them shows a score or a bad ending, so the vote could change what the creature became without any way to lose.
Where can you play a GROW-style puzzle instead?
Much of the original GROW catalogue was rebuilt in HTML5 and still runs on eyezmaze.com. For a new one, Island Evolution is a free browser order puzzle: you predict how eight items will interact, place them one per turn, and the island shows the result straight away.
GROW Race asks you to guess a winner and then plays out without you. Our game hands the guessing back. Before each placement you can look up what every item needs in the evolution chart, make a call about what will grow, and see within one turn whether you were right. If something dies, a banner says which of the five causes it was.
There is one gentle nudge in the strategy section and no more than that. For a step-by-step way of thinking that leaves the order to you, see our order puzzle guide.
Is GROW Race worth watching anyway?
Yes, if you like the GROW art style. It is two and a half minutes of Eyezmaze animation in the usual GROW drawing style, and there is nothing to control.
Watch it with the GROW RT page open in another tab. Nine levels of panels, from the blob at level 1 to the egg at level 7, are the backstory the video never explains on its own.
Place all eight yourself Nine votes built the GROW RT creature. On our island you make eight placements alone, out of 40,320 possible orders, and nobody votes on them.
▶ Grow your own islandWhere do these facts come from?
- Eyezmaze.com archive page "GROW race", dated May 13, 2021, for the description as the final form of GROW RT and the embedded video.
- The EYEZMAZE YouTube upload "GROW Race (Try to guess who will win!)", uploaded May 13, 2021, for the title, running time and thumbnail, and its storyboard frames for the course and ending described above.
- Eyezmaze.com archive page "GROW RT is being held on Twitter", dated December 31, 2020, for the rules, the nine level panels, the retweet targets and the nine poll results.
- The EYEZMAZE Twitter post of March 19, 2021 linked from the GROW race page as GROW RT, for the event running into 2021.
- A Google search for "grow race game" from the United States on September 30, 2026, for the two top results.
- Eyezmaze.com's GROW Cube browser page, dated August 5, 2016, and the Wikipedia series entry's note on the move to HTML5, for the HTML5 rebuilds.
- The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for On Nakayama as the series' creator, the GROW Island (2007) and GROW RPG (2005) release dates, the title list ending with GROW Thanks in November 2018, the mobile ports and the note that no new games have appeared since 2020.