Gondola 1.1 is simple and attractive enough, though initially I found the gameplay somewhat daunting. Once I picked up the basic ideas, though, I was able to breeze through it, and it became rather a fun little casual game.

The core gameplay of Gondola involves the transportation and sorting of coloured shapes, by placing sorting stations on islands, and running ski-lift-like conveyors between them. You begin with an initial allotment of cash for construction and only receive additional funds when the correct things are delivered to their correct destinations. Actually, that’s more fun than it sounds.

In the “Barges” level shown here, you unload one coloured shape from various barges that arrive, convert them to another shape and return the new shape for loading. Simple enough, it seems, as you can simply run your conveyors along to the thingy that converts purple circles to purple triangles.

This is made a little bit more complex, because there are two barges that deliver blue squares, that must be converted to blue circles before they can be converted to blue triangles and returned.

Also among the islands are a generator that creates differently colored blocks, and three destinations that accept different sorts. Each route from a sorting station can be set to accept only a specific shape, a specific colour, both or anything.

Once you’ve figured out what’s going on, the game isn’t very hard to play, though once you start succeeding at it, it’s very difficult to then subsequently fail.

Gondola is free to download and play, written in Python by Arctic Paint, and arrives ready-to-run for either Windows or Linux. Gondola was created as a part of the PyWeek 7 game programming contest.

Play it now.