I've had this on my phone for years, it's a great collection of puzzles. I haven't tried them all (games on phones), but it's certainly the best I have. No ads, no useless gamification, but well polished and varied puzzles, and quite a bit of control over the difficulty.
My favourite has to be "Keen", it's a sudoku-like where a grid has to be filled with no repeated numbers on either columns or rows, and arbitrarily shaped cells must be filled to satisfy an arithmetic constraint like "sums to 7", "the product is 84" or "one divided by the other is 3" (if sized two).
Towers is nice too, similar concept (re repetition), but the constraints are now visibility ranges on the boundaries of the grid, as you put down towers of varying height. I find it more difficult.
Some of the games are more mechanical, where you can mindlessly iterate to a solution step by step. Like "Net" (rotate pipes to connect them all to the center). Towers takes some more guess work, and I find Keen is there in the middle.
As a note, after some years of playing with this puzzles, I recently discovered why its name sounded familiar to me... It's Simon Tatham from PuTTY (the Windows SSH client).
Recommend the Android port as well, available on F-Droid: https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/
I love these puzzles. I find the cube rolling one just so hard to get my head around!
I wonder how many thousands of hours I have put into this wonderful collection. My kids play them too.
There's some jank relating to fractional scaling on Wayland unfortunately, but I keep one monitor without scaling so when I want to play I just launch the puzzles on that.
I love this collection on my phone. It's among the first software that I install to it. Alongside Simon's stuff, Gauguin is also a favorite. It's a sudoku type of game, but with different shapes and math instead of the basic sudoku rules. I love these when I have some time to kill, and I don't want to look at the internet.
If you’re on iOS:
- Puzzles[1] - includes these games and more (sudoku, nonograms, minesweeper, others).
- Nonoverse[2] - it’s just nonograms, but built by hand (not randomly generated); it’s my app, inspired by the above.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/puzzles-reloaded/id6504365885
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
Oh nice! I play Loopy while listening to podcasts or sometimes watching Netflix, and the bugs causing right edge to require double long-hold and left edge to require fanatical precision always drive me nuts, so this is very welcome!
Any way to change the yellow to something tamer, and reduce the line widths slightly?
To clarify, only the second app is mine. I’m a fan of the “Puzzles” and the original from the current HN discussion. But I didn’t like that the nonograms (a.k.a Pattern) were random patterns and not pictures; so I built “Nonoverse” to address that.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about Loopy. If you want, this could be your sign to build your own version :)
I installed that on both my computer and phone after someone mentioned it in some HN comment a few months ago. On my phone it has been the only game I have played in several years that wasn't in an emulator (mostly DOSBox).
Also convinced my kids to install it on their phones, hoping that it will distract them somewhat from the apps they otherwise use. Not much success with that. I guess there isn't enough bling. If it was full of animated coins and sound effects triggering on every interaction it would probably work much better for competing with normal app-driven rubbish mobile games.
I wonder if they would be happy with modern graphics but no twitchy bling. I mean, 3d shaded and colorful tiles. Kids these days associate spartan graphics with old school/boring gameplay.
A version with better UI for mobile could be super neat.
And I don't mean that it needs to be a Flutter app that launches in 3 business days and eats battery like a horse, just that it didn't look like it's from 2012. (Some of the UI design elements are also frankly confusing)
The same puzzles can be played here with a more friendly UI: https://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/
I very much hope people link more like this here. My favourite right now is the love solitaire, and jongmah
I absolutely love Flood type games- but I want huge maps(1000x1000 - 65535x65535). Alas, all of them also kill their playability by wanting absurd money ($5, ha!) and/or flow breaking ads.
related: https://www.janko.at/Raetsel/index.htm huge collection of games and playable online (general desciptions are in German only but the rules of every game are translated in English and Japanese)
Also related: https://puzz.link/db/
And another one: https://www.brainbashers.com/puzzles.asp
I actually might want to port this to homebrew Switch… Good summer project
I discovered these as a child by just combing through the Ubuntu package repositories looking for games.
These days, I play the Android port all the time. It's my go-to to occupy my time on short flights.
Mostly works nicely on black and white android e-readers too.
Thanks for sharing! Awesome new time sinkhole for my phone…
For human-generated logic puzzles that you can solve in your browser, I can recommend the following site:
Found this recently and have been loving it! The one that has stuck the most is Keen but Galaxies is a close second.
Does anyone know of a collection of mini games like that with available source code, and preferably in a more approachable language than C? Thinking that something like this might be great for getting my 9-year interested in coding using a non-visual prog lang (so not Scratch).
Teaching kids to program for over 40 years:
https://www.roug.org/retrocomputing/languages/basic/basicgam...
Net can be done with reasoning rather than mindless iteration. You start by locking in end points surrounded by other end points except for one free space. if you have a straight line that can connect two end points then you lock it in the other orientation. If a line is locked next to a T pipe, the back of the t pipe goes against the line. If a corner piece is next to a locked pipe, you know that the side opposite the incoming pipe is empty, so it could be the back of a T or the side of a line piece, etc.
Yeah, that's what I meant. On the other hand, something like Towers has you trying different configurations because there's not always enough information to motivate the next step.
I haven't tried Towers, but I had thought that every game in his collection was such that guessing was never required. The logic/rules might not always be obvious, but supposedly they are there.
I think there's still a unique solution but, on the harder difficulties, you're given very little to work with. (in Towers)
I like Solo (Sudoku), but that's hard to play on my phone sadly.
I end up doing hard modes of Flood and Signpost a lot, though.