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.
kybernetikos · 52m ago
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.
MITSardine · 44m ago
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.
MostlyStable · 32m ago
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.
Jigsy · 48m ago
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.
tecleandor · 7h ago
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).
merelysounds · 33m ago
If you’re on iOS:
- Puzzles[1] - includes these games and more (sudoku, nonograms, minesweeper, others).
- Nonoverse[2] - is just nonograms, but built by hand (not randomly generated); it’s my app, inspired by the above.
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.
beefsack · 8h ago
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.
privatelypublic · 1h ago
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.
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.
glimshe · 58m ago
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.
cbarrick · 2h ago
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.
ggm · 8h ago
I very much hope people link more like this here. My favourite right now is the love solitaire, and jongmah
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)
Found this recently and have been loving it! The one that has stuck the most is Keen but Galaxies is a close second.
insane_dreamer · 2h ago
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).
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.
I end up doing hard modes of Flood and Signpost a lot, though.
- Puzzles[1] - includes these games and more (sudoku, nonograms, minesweeper, others).
- Nonoverse[2] - is 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...
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.
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.
These days, I play the Android port all the time. It's my go-to to occupy my time on short flights.
https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=95641
https://www.jongmah.com/
https://puzsq.logicpuzzle.app
https://www.roug.org/retrocomputing/languages/basic/basicgam...