A skyline puzzle
Five things to know. Each example is a real Mini board; hover or tap a square to see what it’s worth.
You get a queue of bricks, 1 to 4 wide, colored by width. Put each one on any lot. The Mini board has two lots; bigger boards have three or four.
A floor has to sit completely on the floor under it, the same width or narrower. Nothing hangs over an edge. If you build narrow too early, later bricks won’t fit.
You earn a point for every window, roof, and sidewalk cell that ends the day in sunlight — nothing for anything left in shadow, including your own windows. The sun comes from the west, so a window only earns points if nothing to its west is taller. Under standard light a building shades as far east as it is tall. Winter light reaches twice as far, summer half. Try the sun buttons:
The water tower is one cell wide, comes last, and is worth +2 in the sun. The crown fits over any building you’ve started, doubles its score, and closes it to new floors, so everything you place after it has to go somewhere else. Crowned buildings get a violet outline.
The whole queue is shown from the start; the outlined brick is next. Any brick can be scrapped for −2, and a brick that fits nowhere is scrapped for you. You can undo any move until the last brick lands. After the last brick, the sun sets across the street and the final score is counted.
Pick a board, then a puzzle. Hover or tap a dashed spot to preview it; click, or tap again, to place. Scrap a brick for −2. Undo as much as you like; the score is settled once the last brick lands.
Bricks in play order; the outlined one is next.
In 1915 the Equitable Building went up at 120 Broadway and took the light with it. Thirty-eight stories, 555 feet, not one setback: a sheer wall from sidewalk to roof, filling the block between Cedar and Pine. Its builders had squeezed 1.2 million square feet onto roughly an acre of ground. The shadow covered seven. The Singer Building went dark to its 27th floor, the City Investing Building to its 24th, and three shorter neighbors lost the sun outright.
New York had been arguing about height for years. The Equitable ended the argument. On July 25, 1916, the Board of Estimate adopted the Building Zone Resolution, the first citywide zoning code in the country. It fixed a height at which a building had to start stepping back, and tied that height to the width of the street below — five formulas for five kinds of district, so a tower on a broad avenue could stand taller before it began to taper. In one district a wall could run up 120 feet; past that it bought four more feet of height for every two feet it pulled back. There was a single concession to ambition. A slender tower could rise as far as it liked, so long as it covered no more than a quarter of the lot.
The law was written to protect the street. Architects took it as a form. In 1922 Harvey Wiley Corbett hired the delineator Hugh Ferriss to draw the largest building the code would permit, in four stages, from raw envelope to finished tower. The drawings traveled, and the silhouette they described became the house style of the next twenty years. It held until 1961, when the city swapped setbacks for floor-area ratios and started paying developers in height for plazas at street level.
Setback is that bargain, scored. Sunlight pays, shadow pays nothing, and every floor you lay has to fit on the one beneath it. The puzzles are built by hand, and none of them needs a brick scrapped to solve.
Setback · copy playtest log