Boxed In & Thinking Out of the Box
For the cheevos ‘Boxed In’ and ‘Thinking Out of the Box’ in Tarken Glacier.
Cheevos found in H > Zones > Nightmare Tide > Tarken Glacier
Quick Links
Route to the Puzzle The Puzzle
Route to the Puzzle
Take the Seeping Basin portal into Tarken Glacier and head over to /setwaypoint 5568 2866
Then turn right and follow the edge of the cliff all the way to /setwaypoint 5962 2957
Be careful not to drop down to the chasm below!
The path gets a bit thin along the way with a couple of easy jumps.
At the end of the path you will find a rusty lever.
Pull the lever to teleport to the puzzle area.
The Puzzle
When you first enter the puzzle area you will notice there is lever to get back out and a manugo station.
When you click the manugo machine it will award you with a Dream Ticket.
This ticket will go straight into your quest items box (press L and look at the bottom of the window)
The ticket allows you to interact with the puzzle, only people holding a ticket can interact with the puzzle, so other people will not be able to mess up your puzzle attempt.
You will be playing squares against Omi.
During the game you will be taking it in turns placing lines between the dots on the grid, as the grid fills up you will be able to create full squares with these lines. The player who places the last line that completes a square ‘claims’ that square. The player with the most squares at the end is the winner!
Link to the full guide on wiki
I highly recommend you read the wiki guide for dots and boxes. This will explain to you how to use advanced tactics in order to ‘trick’ your opponent and win the game!
For the puzzle completion you only need to win! That means claiming more than 50% of the board, this is generally pretty easy.
You are on a timer tho, so play quickly! The dots going from green to red at the top of the puzzle is the timer counting down.
There is a separate cheevo called ‘Thinking out of the box’, for completing the board while your opponent has no more than 2 squares .
I am going to attempt to explain how to do that!
In rift, your opponent Omi has 2 basic rules..
RULE 1: if there is a square on the board with 3 sides then she will complete the square
RULE 2: she will only place lines in ‘safe spots’ if possible, meaning she wont make a 3rd line on a square if there are other spots available that wont make a third line.
Knowing that Omi will follow these rules puts you at an advantage and will allow you to control the board.
During the beginning of the game when the board is mostly empty it will all be very random, however as the board fills up you can start to create long chains of nearly complete boxes, towards the end of the game your best situation would be 2 long chains on the board. This wont always happen, it may take a few tries before you get that perfect board, however when it does happen, it is then pretty easy to convince Omi to only take 2 squares! The strategy is explained in the above linked wiki page.. but to put it as simply as possible, you take the majority of the first chain and then sacrifice the last 2 squares so that Omi takes those and then gives you the whole of the second chain. Obviously if you are playing against a real intelligent human then this strategy, although useful, would not always work. but because Omi follows the set rules, she can be tricked!
Here i have made a couple of videos of the puzzle being completed with Omi taking just 2 boxes
TIPS
— Work in ‘areas’ concentrating on small sections of the puzzle while you let Omi do her thing in other areas.
— Work towards 2 open ended routes, or two closed routes
— Keep tracing out the possible path of your route, changing it as you need to when Omi makes her moves
— Dont waste moves by placing lines to complete your route if you know Omi will eventually place a piece there herself following her rules
— If you are working on the puzzle and Omi is being mean and closes loops and you know she will end up with more than 2 squares you can RESET the puzzle by walking back over to the manugo station. You will then need to click the manugo station for another prize ticket to try the puzzle again.
— Dont give up! The two videos above were the 2 in 20ish times that i managed to do it. The strategy takes time and practice and a LOT of luck, sometimes Omi is just mean!
There is also a very very detailed guide on the rift forums written by snap, you can find it here!
Rewards
The reward for the puzzle is a companion pet called Tetromino.
This is a very cute 2 headed turtle.
Repeating the Nightmare Tide puzzles will give you a chance for various minion cards and artifacts.
You can see these rewards on the main Nightmare Tide Puzzle page.