In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life. This week's game: TriJinx.

Shapes make for a good puzzle game – for whatever reason it is a relatively simple fact of life. Tetris? Shapes. Hexagon? Definitely shapes. TriJinx? Yes, even more shapes though this time it is triangles. However, beyond having shapes in a game, you need substance as well, or else all those shapes are going to be put to waste. Thankfully, TriJinx has the gameplay to back everything up and even throws in a unique twist I haven’t seen in a puzzle game before.

TriJinx is all about taking falling triangles and clicking on them when they form groups of three or more. Simple? Yep, course that’s how all casual games get you. They make you feel superior, the master of the casual game domain, then they ratchet up the difficulty, throw in some new moves, and then BANG you are sucked in and can’t stop. The board is setup like a giant triangle, and instead of pieces falling straight down and settling perfectly straight, instead pieces will tumble down the sides of the boards and the sides of the pieces themselves until they settle into place, smack dab between other pieces; now sometimes that piece will fall next to others of the same color, other times it won’t, meaning you just lost a chance for a good connection. Typically, you’d have to make pieces fall into matches by matching other colors below it, for example, which would hopefully trigger a chain reaction and make some pieces land into a combo possibility. Though falling combos like that are still possible and the norm, TriJinx features something that makes it unique – boards you can rotate.

At the bottom of each board are two arrows, one that will turn the board clockwise and the other that will turn the board counterclockwise. So now if pieces falling from the sky don’t land where you need them, you can hopefully change the game in your favor by turning the board over, hoping that by letting the physics of the once resting triangles fall into new places, they’ll land into positions more favorable to you getting the matches you need. It’s a very interesting gameplay mechanic, that completely spins the matching dynamic of the game into whole new areas.

Stages come in all sizes with various obstacles to get in your way. Sometimes you’ll get a board with large pieces, others you’ll get a board with normal sized pieces, and other times you’ll get a board with smaller pieces. The object of each level is that above the board you’ll see colored urns that match those (or some of those) that are playable on your board. You must then match up the colors (such as red matches for the red urn) and then once it is filled you’ll move to the next urn. Unlike many games where collecting colors is left up to you in whatever order you want to do them, here you must complete the urns in the order they appear, so if you see a blue urn but you’re still on a red, don’t go thinking the blue matches will go to your blue total; instead it will only get pieces out of your way so you can hopefully get around to making the red matches. Levels are lost by either not filling up all the urns before the timer runs out, or by having pieces stack up beyond your level (here you’ll get nice warning beeps to tell you that you need to hurry or flip the board so you don’t end up losing that way).

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