GROW ver.1: What Is It, and Can You Still Play It?
GROW ver.1 asks you to pick one of two panels, over and over, and grows a world from a red ball. We played it again in 2026 to see what it is and what still works.
Leshrac
7 min read
In short
- GROW ver.1 is a picture-book game On Nakayama posted on Eyezmaze on December 10, 2006.
- Each step offers two panels, sometimes one. Pick a panel and the scene changes; there are no levels.
- A wrong path stops the run early with two buttons reading GROW and OVER. The original still loads on eyezmaze.com through Ruffle.
- If you would rather see every piece before your first move, Island Evolution is a free order puzzle in the browser.
The game opens on a red ball hanging over a strip of sand, with two blank cream panels underneath. There is no title screen and no instructions. Below the scene sits a bar of eight grey segments ending in the word MAX, a greyed-out Undo button, a Reset button and a speaker icon. In the corner, small letters say GROW Ver.1.1.
We loaded it on October 3, 2026 and played until the game told us to stop. This page covers what ver.1 is, how a run unfolds, why it plays so differently from GROW Cube, and where you can open it now. We do not list which panels to pick. The last sections are about our own browser puzzle, Island Evolution.
What is GROW ver.1?
GROW ver.1 is a short Flash game by On Nakayama, the developer behind Eyezmaze. You grow a small world by choosing one of two panels at each step. It went up on eyezmaze.com on December 10, 2006, and the release note calls it a picture book.
The note is unusually candid. It thanks players for waiting, says the game "may" be finished within five minutes even though it took a long time to make, and admits that an attempt to change the formula "works negatively". It also says Nakayama's four-year-old son could not wait for each new scene and got angry when one was not ready, and suggests playing it with children.
Despite the number, it was not the first GROW game. That was GROW ver.3 in 2002, the title now called GROW Planet; our GROW Planet page covers the backwards numbering, so we will not repeat it here.
How do you play GROW ver.1?
Click one of the panels under the scene. The picture changes, the bar may fill a segment, and a new pair of panels appears. A complete run presumably fills the bar to MAX; a dead end replaces the panels with two buttons reading GROW and OVER.
- Click either blank panel to start. On our run the red ball turned blue and the first object appeared on the sand.
- Wait for the animation. Ours took between about seven and thirty seconds per pick, and there is no skip button.
- Read the new panels. Most steps offer two; some offer only one, which still has to be clicked.
- Watch the bar. Not every pick fills a segment, so the bar is the clearest signal of whether a branch is going anywhere.
Gigazine's review from December 24, 2006 put a full playthrough at about fifteen minutes, three times the creator's estimate. We did not finish a run, but at seven to thirty seconds per animation, our six picks already took a few minutes, most of it spent watching.
Every piece on the table from turn one Our island shows all eight items at the start, with what each one needs written down. You can plan the whole run before the first move.
▶ See the item rulesWhat happened when we played GROW ver.1 in 2026?
Our first run ended after six picks with the bar at four of eight segments. The panels gave way to two buttons that together read GROW OVER, the game's version of game over. We pressed Reset rather than test the buttons.
| What we saw | Our first run |
|---|---|
| Picks made | 6 |
| Steps offering only one panel | 2 |
| MAX bar filled | 4 of 8 segments |
| Undo available | No, greyed out |
| How it ended | GROW / OVER buttons |
Gigazine says Undo unlocks once you have cleared the game. That fits what we saw: on a first attempt, a wrong turn means Reset and a replay of every animation. The release note even jokes that Nakayama will not accept complaints from players who find a wrong branch more interesting than the real ending.
We tried a second time the same day. Midway through, an advertising banner slid up over the bottom of the game and hid the panels, so we stopped there.
How is GROW ver.1 different from GROW Cube?
GROW Cube shows you all of its items at once and asks for an order. GROW ver.1 shows you two panels at a time and asks for a choice. One is a planning puzzle, the other a branching story.
In GROW Cube every item stays on screen and the pieces you have placed keep growing as you add more, so the puzzle is about timing. GROW ver.1 has no levels at all, which Gigazine pointed out in 2006. A panel either moves the story along or it does not, and you only meet the next pair after committing to this one.
That makes ver.1 the gentlest entry for a first-timer and the least satisfying one for anyone who wants to reason their way to an answer. You cannot work out the right branch in advance; you can only remember it afterwards. How the Cube version works is covered in our GROW Cube page.
Can you still play GROW ver.1 after Flash?
Yes. The game page on eyezmaze.com still embeds the original Flash file, and the site now loads Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator, to run it. It worked for us in a current desktop browser in October 2026 with no plugin.
Unlike GROW Cube, GROW Planet and GROW Recovery, it never received an HTML5 rebuild. The Eyezmaze home page lists it as GROW v1 and links to the old Flash page, while those three point to newer browser versions. For the rest of the catalogue after 2020, see our Flash survival list.
The page sets a fixed 550-pixel width, so on a large monitor the game sits in a small box in the middle of the screen.
A wrong run that teaches you something When our island falls short, the sunset results show your score, and Play Again starts the next attempt right away. No replaying the early turns from memory.
▶ Learn the one ruleWhat should you play after GROW ver.1?
A puzzle you can plan. Island Evolution gives you 8 items, shows what each needs to grow, and asks for the order. There are 40,320 possible orders and 3 of them reach the perfect score of 27.
GROW ver.1 is fun to watch but gives you no way to think ahead. Island Evolution still lets you watch an island grow piece by piece, but you plan the order first, and a run that falls short fails in one of five named ways, from a withered sapling to a capsized raft. The restart button in the corner works at any time, and tapping during an animation skips it, so a failed idea costs seconds.
If you want a method to work from, our order puzzle guide walks through one. For a nudge on our island specifically, the hints section stops short of the answer, and the game FAQ covers how your best score is kept. For the other titles in the series, see the full GROW list.
No waiting it out GROW ver.1 has no skip button. Tap during any of our animations and it jumps ahead, so you can try an order and see how far the island gets before sunset.
▶ Start a runWhere do these facts come from?
- Eyezmaze.com, the "GROW ver.1(GAME)" page dated December 10, 2006, for the release date, the release note quoted and paraphrased above, and the embedded Flash file.
- Our own playthrough on that page on October 3, 2026, through the Ruffle player the page loads, for the opening scene, the MAX bar, the one-panel steps, animation times, the GROW and OVER buttons, the greyed Undo button and the 550-pixel game area, and a second attempt the same day for the different scenes and the ad banner.
- Gigazine, "GROW ver.1" review dated December 24, 2006, for the two-choice format, the absence of levels, the fifteen-minute estimate, the underground kingdom ending and Undo unlocking after a clear.
- The Eyezmaze home page game list, checked October 3, 2026, for the GROW v1 listing and which titles link to newer browser versions.
- The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for On Nakayama as creator, GROW ver.3 as the 2002 first entry and its 2009 renaming to GROW Planet, and the series rule that each press changes the world and the puzzle is the order of presses.
- The Ruffle project's own site, ruffle.rs, for Ruffle being an open-source Flash Player emulator.
- A Google search for "grow ver 1" from the United States on October 3, 2026, whose results include a YouTube video titled "GROW ver.1(second ending)".
