Zhalchemy 4: Hanzi Forge

Zhalchemy 4: Hanzi Forge turns Chinese characters into a game of alchemy. Break a character into its real components, drag them into the summoning circle, and name what you are forging in pinyin. Get the spell right and the new character joins your board.

Everything runs on your device. The dictionary, the character decompositions, the readings and the meanings are all packaged with the app, so a full game works with no network connection at all.

WHAT YOU CAN PLAY

• Pass-and-play for 1 to 6 players on one device, with a turn clock you set
• Puzzle of the Day, the same puzzle for everyone, every day
• Explorer mode: no clock, no score, just take characters apart
• Five guided tutorials that teach the rules on the real board

HOW IT WORKS

Every character in the game breaks into the parts it is genuinely built from. Drop those parts into the summoning circle in the right order and you forge something new: 日 and 月 make 明, and 十 with 日 and 月 makes 朝.

Look Up pauses the clock so you can study a character's components and the words it appears in. Berserk lets you buy your opponent's turn when you are close to the target. Written forms show a character shapeshifting into the shape it takes inside another, so you learn that 水 becomes 氵 and 灬, and 目 becomes 罒.

Solved a hard one? Share the recipe tree as a single image.

WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM

The character data is drawn from openly licensed sources: CC-CEDICT, the Unicode Unihan database, and cjklib-derived decompositions. Every licence and attribution is readable inside the app.

No account. No sign-in. No ads. No tracking. Nothing leaves your device.