In the upcoming puzzle craft programming game "Craftomation 101," you have a frozen planet, a bunch of polite and friendly robots, and a bunch of raw materials. From there, it's your job to direct how to assemble enough heat, power, and industrial materials to trigger the terraforming process that will make this world a warmer place.

Most fascinating, obviously, are the little robots, the Craftmates, each scripted in an easy-to-understand visual language to do exactly what you want. At first, it's simple things like sparking fuel with a stone or placing fuel on a fire pit, but from there it teaches them to keep refueling and to gather the materials they need to expand to more complex materials.

Of course, there is a lot that can be done manually, but the fun of programming the bots was enough to get me through the demo alone, so I let them do almost everything anyway.Craftomation 101 is the first genuinely fun education I've played in decades It has the bones of another good game from Luden.io, an indie company that has made games.

You may have seen Luden.io's other games, but they have basically monopolized, for my attention and money, the niche market of games that balance fun and educational principles and teach the basics of new, interesting, and useful skills. Luden.io began with While True: Learn(), a game about decoding a cat's language that got a lot of attention, and then Learning Factory, an automation and factory game about machine learning. This was before machine learning was actively (and in my opinion pointlessly) rebranded as AI and people started to hate it. [Craftomation 101 is available on Steam with a free demo and will be in Early Access on February 19, 2024.