Our Chat with the Crew behind plant puzzler Primrows!
- Eric Halliday
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
A ways back I met some of the crew behind the game Primrows at the 2025 Cleveland Gaming Classic and immediately got myself caught up in the puzzler. So did my kids. It's been a thing in this house. And, excitingly, we also got the chance to talk with them.
The following is an interview I did was some of the crew behind the clever garden game.
Eric Halliday: I want to thank everyone for taking time to talk with me today. Why don’t we take a moment so you can all introduce yourselves. Who you are, what you do, if you were a tree, what kind would you be? That fun stuff.
Cathy: I’m Cathy Kimport, I’m the designer and lead programmer for Primrows, and I founded Tursiops Truncatus Studios in 2006. If I were a tree, I think I’d have to be a balsam fir, because I’m most comfortable in cold climates and I don’t fare well when the world around me is on fire.
Susan: My name is Susan Schaffer, and I am the Lead Artist for Primrows, creating all in-game art assets and marketing materials. If I were a tree, I would be a palm tree, so I could be in a tropical place.
Kitt: I’m Kitt Burgess, it was lovely meeting you at Cleveland Gaming Classic! I’m the Marketing Manager here at Tursiops - I create everything you see across our socials, and love coming up with new ways to share our game with people! If I were a tree, I’d be a Mangrove Tree. I grew up in south Florida, and used to climb them all the time.
Eric: I’m Eric Halliday, I’m the co-owner of Pixigonal and am just in awe of how the “tree” question went in three absolute different directions and I love it.
Question 1:
Eric Halliday: So, in your own words, give me the elevator pitch for what Primrows is.
Cathy Kimport: Primrows is what you get when you turn sudoku into a dice game.
Susan: Primrows is a pattern recognition game that combines luck and logic set in a relaxing visual and auditory environment.
Kitt: Primrows is a puzzle game available on Steam and mobile that combines Sudoku mechanics with adorable flowers.
Question 2:
Eric: So, how did Primrows come to be?
Cathy: This version of Primrows is actually a remake of a game we released for iPhone back in 2010. Around the late 00’s, I was starting to toy with making mobile games. I had a handful of different prototypes I was kicking around at the time, looking for a promising idea, but the one that stuck was this game loosely based on a dream I had around 2006 about a Sudoku slot machine. It had the core mechanics and the flower theme of the 2025 edition, but it was a much more modest game overall. It was a good game, it wasn’t wildly successful, it had its flaws, but it had its fans. Unfortunately, it was one of thousands of classic games removed from sale in 2017 due to iOS ending support for older apps, and given its limited commercial success it just didn’t make sense to take time and resources away from our project at the time in order to do the overhauls needed to make the required technical changes to Primrows.
Cathy (continued): So, when we get to 2023 and we’re wrapping up the final content updates to The Day We Fought Space, we decide that we want to follow it up with a smaller game that we can release a lot quicker, something that we can use as a good starter game for migrating to Unity and trying some new things as a company. We turn to our back catalogue and decide that Primrows is the best choice of something we can remake, and we want to not only bring Primrows back from the halls of lost media but also to see what we can do with the game as a more experienced studio.
Question 3:
Eric Halliday: What sort of plans does Primrows have in the future? Is there a roadmap? Console release? Things of that sort?
Cathy: What’s coming very soon is a daily replay feature that should help new players get up to speed with challenges that they missed if they haven’t been playing every week since launch. A bit further down the road, we’re bringing back something that was cut from launch plans, which is kind of a mini puzzle campaign designed to teach players some of the more advanced strategies of the game. That will cover a lot of not-strictly-necessary things that were cut out of the tutorials for pacing reasons. And, of course, there are lots of weekly and monthly challenges yet to come. By the time we’ve wrapped up development, you can expect to have 75 to 100 total challenges in the game.
Eric: That’s honestly fantastic to see more things coming down the line for the game. It looks like there’s a lot of ways this can branch out from here. Since my kids saw it at the Cleveland Gaming Classic, we’ve been sharing our screens with each other whenever we get a particularly high score and it’s cool to see that there’s more coming in the future.
Kitt: This is so wholesome. People sharing their experiences with our game is part of why we do this! We’re so happy we’re able to bring some of our own passion and excitement over to you and your kids.
Question 4:
Eric Halliday: Cathy, I think it’s funny how you mention a dice game. My ten-year-old was playing it the other day and thought about how cool it would be if there was a physical version of the game where you set up the board in a certain way but all the buttons were pictures on physical die so if you rolled them they’d change up what they were. Growth mechanic might have to change but would that ever be something you all have considered?
Cathy: A physical version of Primrows is something we’ve had in the back of our minds since we started development. My idea was for something kind of like the dice shaker from classic Boggle but with an added mechanism to lock flowers in place, Susan envisioned it more as drawing flowers out of a bag. Or we could even do something simpler like drawing cards from a deck.
We tabled those discussions when it became clear that there was just so much about working in tabletop games that we didn’t know and would have to learn, and we just needed to put all our focus into the digital game. But I think most of us never stopped wanting to have a physical version someday, so maybe something will come of that?
In any case, those early design talks about the possibility of a physical game did end up having a big influence on the visual design of the game.