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Africa Puzzle Empire
Solve puzzles. Build your empire across Africa.
How it plays
Solve
Hand-crafted puzzles that get smarter as you do, never merely harder.
Earn
Every solved board pays out resources you actually need.
Build
Spend what you earn on cities, landmarks and infrastructure.
Expand
Unlock new regions, each with its own culture, music and challenges.
The real thing
This game is about a real place and real people. These are objects they made, photographed by the museums that hold them — not our drawings of them.
A brass weight used to measure gold dust. The board in Africa Puzzle Empire is built from shapes like this one, and they are units of a real measuring system rather than ornament.
Geometric gold weight — Akan artist · 16th–17th century · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1994.312.3 · CC0. See it at the museum
A gold weight cast in the shape of a sword. Figurative weights carried proverbs as well as mass, so a set was both a scale and a way of saying something.
Sword gold weight — Akan artist · 18th–19th century · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1994.312.7 · CC0. See it at the museum
A gold weight cast as a chair. The Akan goldsmiths who made these worked to tolerances a modern balance can still verify.
Chair gold weight — Akan artist · 18th–19th century · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1994.312.12 · CC0. See it at the museum