GROW Tower Game: Reach the Sun Without a Walkthrough
In short
- GROW Tower is a January 2009 Eyezmaze puzzle. You click five panels in some order, and the pieces build a tower toward a sun-shaped lamp.
- You win when every panel reaches Lv.MAX. Only one order gets all five there.
- Five panels means 120 possible orders. A method finds the right one faster than trying them all.
- For a bigger version of the same puzzle, Island Evolution has eight items and 40,320 orders, free in the browser.
If you are searching for the GROW Tower game, you have probably clicked the five panels a few times, watched the tower wobble upward, and ended with something short of the sun. Or you remember it from years ago and want to know where it went. This page covers both: what the game is, how its pieces grow each other, and how to find the order without a walkthrough.
We will not print the sequence. A copied order turns the puzzle into a short animation, and the method below is the part worth keeping. We built our own order puzzle on the same idea, so this is also how we think about ours.
What is the GROW Tower game?
A short browser puzzle by On Nakayama, released on eyezmaze.com in January 2009. You click five panels one at a time, and the objects they add grow and react to each other. The goal is to grow a tower up to a lamp shaped like the sun.
It belongs to the GROW series, the run of order puzzles that includes GROW RPG and GROW Cube from 2005. Every entry works the same way at heart. You get a handful of pieces, you choose the order they go in, and the game plays out the consequences. You make no other decisions.
GROW Tower is one of the smaller entries. The five panels, as reviewers listed them, are a grey box with a red button, a yellow pot, a pile of bricks, a patch of earth and a red flower pot. A small creature turns up partway through. The whole thing fits on one screen and a run is over quickly.
How does GROW Tower work?
Each click adds one panel's object to the tower. After every click, the pieces already there can level up, and some change what the others become. Eyezmaze's own instructions say the game is complete when all panels reach Lv.MAX.
The level indicators for each panel are shown on screen, so you can see how far each piece got. That makes GROW Tower easier to read than some of its siblings. GROW RPG, for example, hides the result behind a fight animation.
The pieces change each other as the tower rises. Reviewers describe the yellow pot sprouting an arm and then a head, the button box releasing a pile of objects that eventually grows a gear, and the bricks splitting into a creature with pincer arms that grabs whatever sits below it. Put a piece down in the wrong place in the sequence and one of those interactions works against you.
Jay Is Games' January 2009 review flagged the catch that makes this entry harder than it looks: you have to get the order right before any of the items reaches its maximum level, so a bad start cannot be repaired late in the run.
Same idea, eight pieces instead of five Island Evolution gives you eight items to place on a deserted island, with a chart that shows what each one needs. Free, no download.
▶ Learn it in a minuteWhy won't my tower reach the sun?
Because at least one panel did not reach Lv.MAX. Either it went in too late to finish growing, or a piece placed after it interfered. The fix is to find that one panel and move it.
After a failed run, look at the level indicators before you click restart. Most players skip this and go straight to a new guess. The screen already shows which panel fell short, which is most of what you need.
Then ask why it fell short. If it barely grew at all, it probably arrived with too few clicks left. If it grew and then got stuck or changed into something unhelpful, look at what came after it. The pincer bricks are an obvious suspect in any run where something underneath them stops behaving. The general version of this reasoning is in our order puzzle guide.
How many orders does GROW Tower have?
120. Five panels can go in five times four times three times two times one different orders. Only the right one gets every panel to Lv.MAX.
That number is small enough to brute force. Even at two minutes a run, trying every order would take four hours. Most people who give up and search for the answer have played far fewer runs than that, and usually without writing anything down.
Compare that with GROW RPG, which has eight items and 40,320 orders, or GROW Cube, which has ten and 3,628,800. Adding three pieces makes the puzzle 336 times larger. That is why the method matters more than luck in the bigger games, and why GROW Tower is a good place to practise it.
How do you find the order without a walkthrough?
Start with a reasoned guess, change one panel's slot per run, and keep notes. Each run then rules something out, so you close in on the answer in a handful of tries instead of dozens.
Build the first guess from three questions. Which piece do the others seem to build on? It probably wants an early slot. Which piece needs many clicks to reach Lv.MAX? It also wants to go early. Which piece seems to disturb what is already there? Push it as late as you can.
Play that guess and note the weakest panel. Move it one slot earlier and play again. If it improved and nothing else got worse, keep the change. If something else broke, you have just found an interaction between two pieces, which tells you more than a lucky win would.
Once a panel is clearly in the right place, stop moving it. With five panels, locking in two leaves only six orders for the other three, and you can try all six in a few minutes. The one mistake to avoid is swapping two panels at once. If the result changes, you will not know which move caused it.
This is the same method we laid out in beating GROW RPG. It works on every game in the series because they all share one rule: the same order always produces the same result.
Where can you play GROW Tower today?
On eyezmaze.com, where the game's page is still up. The GROW series originally ran on Flash and was later ported to HTML5 when Flash was shut down.
Plenty of other sites mirrored the Flash files over the years, and many of those copies no longer run. If a page shows a blank box or asks you to install a plugin, it is one of them. The story of which GROW games made it past Flash is in what survived after Flash, and what GROW games are lists the whole series with dates.
What should you play after GROW Tower?
Another order puzzle with rules you have not seen yet. The method only stays fun while the answer is unknown, so a fresh puzzle beats replaying one you have already solved.
Island Evolution is our take on the same mechanic. You place eight items on a deserted island, one at a time, and each placement changes what the others can become. The evolution chart shows what each item needs, so you can reason about the order before you commit. There are 40,320 orders, a 27-point maximum, and three orders that reach it.
We do not publish those three orders. The best order section explains how scoring works without giving the answer away, and the game FAQ covers the rest.
Try the method on a fresh puzzle Eight items, three perfect orders, no walkthrough. It runs in the browser with no account and nothing to install.
▶ Start a runWhere do these facts come from?
- The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for the creator, the release month and the move from Flash to HTML5.
- The GROW Tower page on eyezmaze.com, for the Lv.MAX win condition.
- Jay Is Games' January 2009 review of GROW Tower, for the five panels and the note about maximum levels.
- It Still Works' guide to GROW Tower, for the sun-shaped lamp goal and the piece interactions.