Kigumi: Wood Joinery Puzzle
Build temples without nails
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Build real structures without a single nail: a Japanese gate and pagoda, Stonehenge, a stave church, a log chapel. Piece by piece, in the one order the joints allow.
Kigumi (木組, "wood, joined") is a calm building game about the joinery that has held Japanese buildings together for a thousand years — without nails, screws or glue.
Take a piece, slide it home along the only path its joint allows, and feel it seat. Some joints are snug and take a few taps of the mallet. Build in the wrong order and the wood tells you: a beam laid too early can shut another out for good. Finding the order is the puzzle.
• 27 structures across five chapters: a garden, a temple, a canal town, the old capital, and then the world
• Real joints, simplified: through-tenons, wedges, half-laps, hooked splices, pinned posts
• Every structure takes its place in a place that grows — the garden sits inside the temple, the temple in the town, the town in the city
• A master joint ends each chapter: kanawa-tsugi, the raising of the ridgepole, sampō-zashi, the bracket set that carries a temple's eaves, and the Lu Ban lock
• The world, built without nails: Stonehenge's stone mortises, China's thousand-year-old wooden pagoda at Yingxian, the stave church at Borgund, an Inca doorway at Machu Picchu, and a log chapel on Kizhi
• Easy mode for children: paths shown, the next piece glows, nothing can go wrong
• Normal mode: the order is yours to find; build it cleanly at par for the seal
• Master: build any structure again with no warning until nothing more fits; no undo and no hint earns the master's seal
• A finale: once everything stands, one long dawn from the garden out to the whole world
• People walk the paths, koi circle the ponds, and at dusk the lanterns are lit
• The seasons follow your calendar: cherry blossom in spring, green maples in summer, red in autumn, snow in winter
• A gallery of everything you have built, each one turning in the light
• Quiet koto and shakuhachi, wind, water and temple bells — all made in code
The garden is free. One purchase, The Whole Way, unlocks the temple, the town, the city and the world: yours to keep, and shared with your family.
No ads. No accounts. No data collected.
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The developer, Ivo Iturrieta, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
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Information
- Seller
- Ivo Iturrieta
- Size
- 2.7 MB
- Category
- Puzzle
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 18.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 18.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 18.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 2.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English and Japanese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- The Whole Way $4.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Ivo Iturrieta
