GROW Game Series: Every Game in Order
Twelve main GROW games, February 2002 to July 2015, in release order, each linked to a guide where we have one. Side titles, from the nano games to GROW Kingdom, are in the second table.
Leshrac
8 min read
In short
- A GROW game gives you a handful of items and one decision each: when to place it.
- Twelve main titles, from GROW ver.3 on February 7, 2002 to GROW Park in July 2015. The table below links every one we have a guide for.
- GROW Cube (September 2005) is the one most people mean. Its win is every item at MAX.
- Our own three perfect orders, from a different game, are on the order solver.
A GROW game gives you a handful of items and one decision to make about each: when to use it. You do not aim, you do not race a timer, and you cannot lose by being slow. You pick an order, press play on the world, and watch what your order turned into. That is the whole genre, and it has kept people busy for over twenty years.
It has also been out of production since 2018, which is why we built Island Evolution: the same one-decision-per-item shape, eight items, 40,320 orders and exactly three that reach a perfect score, running in a browser tab with no plugin. You can read how it works in a minute. What follows is the family it came from.
Who made the GROW games?
On Nakayama, a Japanese independent developer, published them at eyezmaze.com from February 2002. He made them alone, in Flash, with a hand-drawn look that almost nobody has copied convincingly.
Ours is not one of his; it is an independent game built on the same idea, and the rules are published rather than hidden. His first entry, confusingly titled GROW ver.3, went up on February 7, 2002, and every main title after it came from the same one-person workshop over the next thirteen years.
The naming has always been a joke at the player's expense. GROW ver.3 came first. GROW ver.2 arrived in June 2006, and GROW ver.1 in December 2006, four years after the "third" one.
How does a GROW game actually work?
Every GROW game runs the same loop:
- You are shown a world and a small panel of items.
- You pick one item. It appears in the world at its lowest level.
- Everything already in the world tries to advance one level.
- Repeat until the panel is empty, then watch the ending you earned.
The trick is in step 3. Each item only levels up when the things it depends on are far enough along, so an item placed early gets many chances to grow, and an item placed last gets exactly one. Your order is really a budget: you are deciding who gets time and who does not. How to actually spend that budget is its own guide.
Get it right and every piece reaches its top form and the world becomes something absurd and wonderful. Get it wrong and you get a stunted, half-built version of the same world, which is somehow more memorable than the win.
What are all the GROW games, by release date?
Twelve main titles, from GROW ver.3 on February 7, 2002 to GROW Park in July 2015. A guide link means this site has a page. A blank guide means we have the date and not a write-up.
| Title | Released | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| GROW ver.3 | February 2002 | GROW Planet |
| GROW RPG | July 2005 | GROW RPG order |
| GROW Cube | September 2005 | GROW Cube order |
| GROW ver.2 | June 2006 | Phone name GROW JUNGLE. No separate guide. |
| GROW ver.1 | December 2006 | GROW ver.1 |
| GROW Island | September 2007 | GROW Island order |
| GROW Tower | January 2009 | GROW Tower order |
| GROW Valley | August 2010 | GROW Valley order |
| GROW Cannon | January 2011 | |
| GROW Maze | March 2013 | |
| GROW Clay | February 2014 | |
| GROW Park | July 2015 | GROW Park |
Side titles, in the order we have dates for. GROW City is not in either table: the game by that name is Hooda Math's, covered on the GROW City page.
| Title | Released | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| GROW ORNAMENT | December 2005 | |
| GROW nano, ver.0 through vol.4 | 2006 to 2011 | GROW nano |
| GROW Cinderella | October 2016 | |
| GROW Comeback | June 2018 | |
| GROW Thanks | November 2018 | |
| GROW Race | May 13, 2021 | GROW Race. A video, not a game. |
| GROW Kingdom EP1 | July 17, 2024 | GROW Kingdom |
Click orders for the Eyezmaze games are not in those guides. We have not verified one. What each order page does state is the win condition and the pieces. Flash survival, including ver.2 on phones as GROW JUNGLE, is in what survived after Flash. The rest of Nakayama's site is on the Eyezmaze games list.
The series stopped. The genre did not. Island Evolution is the same one-decision-per-item shape: 8 items, 40,320 orders, 3 that reach a perfect 27. No download, no account.
▶ Open the gameCan you still play GROW games now that Flash is gone?
Most of them, yes — the catalogue was rebuilt in HTML5 before the plugin died, and a few titles reached mobile as well. Which ones survived, which are gone for good, and what Ruffle can do about the rest is the subject of what survived after Flash.
New releases stopped after 2018. That is a large part of why people still search for games like these: the originals are finite, and there were never very many of them.
Why do people still search for GROW games in 2026?
Order puzzles are cheap to explain and expensive to solve. There is no tutorial to write, no controls to learn, and no reflexes involved, so anyone can start. But eight items already means 40,320 possible orders, and the solution space is not something you can feel your way through by instinct.
They also fail in an entertaining way. Most puzzle games punish a wrong move with a buzzer. A GROW game shows you exactly what your bad idea did to the world, in animation, and lets you sit with it. Failure is content.
The genre's real invention is that losing is worth watching.
Try one right now Island Evolution is an original order puzzle in the same spirit: 8 items, 40,320 orders, 3 of them perfect. Free, no download.
▶ Play freeWhich GROW game should you start with?
GROW Cube if you want the one everyone means, GROW Island or GROW Valley if you would rather not be stuck for an afternoon, and GROW Park if you want something that gives you a result on every attempt.
The difficulty is mostly a function of how many items there are, because the number of possible orders grows factorially. Six items give 720 orders, eight give 40,320, ten give 3,628,800, and the twelve-button entries give 479 million. Anything above eight stops being solvable by patience.
The second factor is whether the item names tell you anything. GROW Cube gives you a pot, a bone and a ball, which say nothing about what they do. GROW Island names its panels after engineering disciplines, so your first guess is at least an educated one. If you are new to the genre, start where the names help.
Where do these facts come from?
- The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for the twelve main titles, the MiniGROW line, every release date in the tables, the February 7, 2002 debut, and GROW ver.2 on phones as GROW JUNGLE.
- Our GROW Race page, from the Eyezmaze archive entry dated May 13, 2021, for GROW Race being a video.
- Our Eyezmaze page, from the front page checked October 4, 2026, for GROW Kingdom EP1 dated July 17, 2024.
- Eyezmaze.com, On Nakayama's own site, for the catalogue itself and the HTML5 remakes; its GROW Cube browser page is dated August 5, 2016.
- The mobile release dates for GROW Cube (Android September 2014, iOS October 2014), GROW RPG (April 2015) and GROW Park (Android July 2015, iOS August 2015), as listed in the same Wikipedia entry.
- Adobe's Flash Player end-of-life announcement (July 2017), for the December 31, 2020 end-of-support date.
- Island Evolution's own rule table, for the 40,320 orders and the three perfect ones.
