Junior Arithmancer

I guess one could describe Junior Arithmancer by Mike Spivey as a maths exam simulator if wizards studied maths. However, after playing it, I have now come to the realisation that this is a dark work of genius that drives an obsession to understand the beauty of maths that won’t let you go until you get a perfect score (and potentially even then to go beyond a perfect score).

The obsession creeps up on you slowly at first. The first part of the game equips you with a progressively expanding armoury of spells to manipulate numbers into sequences of ten of the key mathematical constants, e.g. pi. By a combination of intuition and experimentation you begin to understand what each spell does and how you can link spells to create different number sequences.

The second part of the game challenges you to go beyond, initially by optimising your solutions and then to understand the patterns in the game such as the link between colours and numbers and why certain numbers are “magic”. This is where the obsession takes hold as you start to reveal the patterns, both real and imaginary.

This game can very loosely be defined as interactive fiction. There is a light story about university politics going on in the background but the core of the game is about the task challenges. It’s probably closer to being interactive non-fiction.

This is a really, really clever and well implemented game. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Spivey follows this game up with Senior Arithmancer that requires you to solve the Riemann hypothesis and create a whole new branch of mathematics.

Genius.