Descartes Rainbow is the sequel to Descartes Enigma. It’s the same basic game idea, except that Descartes Rainbow (naturally enough) supports multi-colored puzzles. Puzzles are constructed with any of 12 different colors (black, gray, white, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, and magenta). Most puzzles have between 3 and 7 colors in them. The clues, of course, show you the color of each block on a row or column as well as the number of squares in the block. In Descartes Enigma, you knew that there was at least one white (background) square between any two black (colored) blocks. In Descartes Rainbow, the background color is not necessarily always white (although that’s most common), and there may or may not be any background colored squares between two adjacent colored blocks (unless those two blocks are the same color, then there has to be at least one background square between them, to keep them from being the same block).

In Descartes Enigma, all deductions involved just looking at the clues for a single row or column. In Descartes Rainbow, you can frequently (and sometimes have to) make deductions by comparing clues in both the rows and the columns at the same time. For example, if a row has a clue that is RED 4, you know that it can only be located in 4 adjacent columns that have RED clues. That can frequently narrow down the possibilities dramatically, but can also add a more complex puzzle-solving experience. This makes the game very similar to Descartes Enigma, while at the same time giving it a unique twist.

Descartes Rainbow comes with over 1250 multi-colored picture puzzles, and over 6,000 random multi-colored “ink-blot” puzzles. As additional puzzle sets become available, they will be downloadable from this page. However, those additional puzzle sets require the licensed version of the game, as they aren’t loadable by the shareware version.