The Gradualist

About The Gradualist

The Gradualist is an authored color puzzle game built on a single fact: a gradient is not a transition. It is a construction.

Each assignment presents a scrambled field of colored cells with one correct solved order. The task is to restore it by sliding whole rows and columns with wraparound motion. Movement commits to the nearest cell on release. The board resolves the moment it reads correctly — there is no analyze step, no submit button.

Each solve is scored by efficiency: how close the move count comes to the optimum for that field. Replays update the record only when better.

The game contains eighty-one hand-authored assignments, organized into nine studies. Each study advances the formal vocabulary — strip grammar first, then grid logic, full-field reading, narrowing contrast, structural coupling, and late-game architecture with linked strips and void cells.

There is no timer, no move cap, no fail state, no randomness. Each puzzle is designed. The construction is fixed; only the solve is the player's.

Mastery is tracked across five ranks — Vorkurs, Lehrling, Geselle, Jungmeister, Meister — based on completion, efficiency, and consistency.

Nine studies, named for Bauhaus figures from across the school's disciplines, frame the progression.

Part of the Bauhaus Suite — four standalone games, each its own instrument.

Every solved assignment becomes a record card on the collection grid, exportable as an image of the resolved field.

The game is fully offline. No accounts. No analytics. No ads. No in-app purchases. Nothing leaves the phone.

The eye can be trained.