33 ms·

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

212 points by r2b2 2y ago

opminion 2y ago
The Android version worked very well when I installed it year ago. It was a great choice for someone who does not want to have addictive games installed in the phone, while at the same time enjoy the occasional brain teaser.
- viernullvier 2y ago
  I have to vehemently disagree with you here - the Android version is the main reason why I needed to set a "no phone in the bedroom" rule for myself.
  - fanf2 2y ago
    Simon likes to joke that the time wasted on his puzzle collection has surely cancelled out all the productivity benefits from PuTTY.
    - tecleandor 2y ago
      Ah, of course, THAT Simon Tatham! That's why his name sounded familiar each time I launched the puzzles... facepalm
mmastrac 2y ago
These are pretty basic to advanced brain puzzles, but there's a few gems in there. Magnets is a lot of fun. Net, Signposts and Tracks are clever puzzles. There was one other one in there I used to enjoy but I can't recall which one it was (maybe Pattern?). They're all about on-par with the level of exciting-ness of Minesweeper and Sudoku. Take that as you wish.
rustcleaner 2y ago
I install this on everything. It is really really good, and IMO the way more games should be made: make a fast simple windowmanager friendly interface presenting puzzles and games in a very pure and unencumbered form. Another example: I love SimCity 2000 for Win95, but not SimCity 3000 or SimCity 4. Why? Wright did 2000 right, the post-EA SimCities were all full screen flashy playskool interface monstrosities. 3000 brought some cool features in, but I wish they had kept to a 2000-like interface. My ideal games look something like Siemens PLM NX or something, and less like a one-armed bandit in Vegas.
- II2II 2y ago
  Along similar lines, I really enjoyed shapez. Please forgive the blasphemy here, but I never could get into Factorio even though many of the mechanics are similar. (The former allowed me to focus on game play. The latter was a little too grim for my liking.)
  - MForster 2y ago
    Is it because of the enemies? FWIW, you can turn them off. I always play with them disabled. Just not what I'm interested in. You might enjoy that, too. I also enjoyed shapez, but it's no comparison to the depth of Factorio, especially with mods.
    - II2II 2y ago
      Thank you. The enemies are a big part of it. I will give turning them off a try.
- casenmgreen 2y ago
  SC2K had a beautiful interface, I concur, but it was broken as a sim, because of how transport was simulated. Paths were drawn, kind of like ray-traced, from each tile, and at a junction, a random route was taken. There was no directiveness. So for example if you made a little group of roads as a 3x3 set of tiles, practically no routes would exit before timing out by travelling too far, because they would keep taking random exits, and so stay within the 3x3 set of road tiles. As such, you could not build a natural, normal transport system - for example, a central ring road or subway, with routes radiating outwards off of the ring. The only way to build a viable city was to understand how the transport sim worked, and then build a transport layout to fit how it worked.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    As an aside, it really does feel like many games aren't about what they seem to be on the surface. The SimCity series was less about building a city than it was about managing traffic. SimTower was less about property management, and more about elevator management. Factorio is less about building a factory, as it is about resource routing. Or, later, programming trains. Or later, god knows what, I haven't gotten that far. Baldur's Gate III is less about defeating the BBEG through RPG mechanics, and more about choosing who to romance (Karlach).
3836293648 2y ago
I install these on everything and play them to procrastinate all the time. The only issue is that they break entirely with 200% DPI
leni536 2y ago
It has the best version of minesweeper, where every board is solvable.
- viernullvier 2y ago
  You can also swap primary and secondary clicks (at least in the Android version), which makes it the fastest on touchscreens as well.
  - dsvf 2y ago
    Even better, the latest release from a few weeks ago lets you manually set the delay for long press. I've set it for 100ms and can now blaze through mines even faster. But that guaranteed solvable makes it so much better than nondeterministic minesweeper as well.
  - leni536 2y ago
    I just never flag the mines.
- ooterness 2y ago
  There was a Minesweeper variant called Kaboom, where you're playing against a computer that's trying to make you lose. The computer has to comply with all revealed information, but if you ever make a guess, no matter how improbable, it's have over. https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ Previous discussion on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875
  - omoikane 2y ago
    There is also Yusuke Endoh's version, where the only thing you do is guess. Computer will automatically mark all the spots where it has enough information to make an inference. https://mame.github.io/minesweeper-spoiled-by-ai/ https://mame.github.io/minesweeper-spoiled-by-ai/
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
RheingoldRiver 2y ago
Bridges (aka "Hashi") is one of my all-time favorite logic puzzles. I recently discovered Galaxies, and I enjoy this one a lot too; I also like Slitherlink (called "Loopy" here) a lot. However this site is missing two that I like quite a bit more, which are Paint by Numbers & Battleships, both of which I originally started doing in Games Magazine and later found on Conceptis Puzzles [0] (they call PbN "Pic-A-Pix") where I bought $25 worth of credits maybe 20 years ago that have still kept me going to this day, every couple years I'll buy a week's puzzle bundle and then slowly go through them. The other one I used to play a lot is Mamono Sweeper [1] One summer in undergrad when I was supposed to be doing graph theory research, instead I got really, really, really good at basic arithmetic by playing this game for 5+ hours a day. This is how I learned that I had no interest in math grad school and I now work as a developer in a video game-adjacent space. Recently I made an online Pentominoes puzzle [2] and I've played it a lot also. If anyone knows a good source of free Paint by Numbers puzzles I would love to hear about it! [0] https://www.conceptispuzzles.com/ https://www.conceptispuzzles.com/ [1] https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper [2] https://pentominoes.river.me https://pentominoes.river.me
- votiv 2y ago
  I am quite addicted to Suguru puzzles. I hope Simon gets to implement them some time.
- tangus 2y ago
  SGT's Puzzle Collection does have a limited version of "Paint by Numbers". It's limited tho: only abstract patterns in black and white. It's called "Pattern".
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  https://nonograms-katana.com https://nonograms-katana.com seems to have quite a few? I found it by searching for the much more common name "picross".
  - Y444 2y ago
    Picross is somehow ended up being a trademark of Nintendo iirc
viernullvier 2y ago
This was one of the first games I installed on my very first Android phone, the Motorola Milestone. 15 years later, I'm still playing it nearly every day. I'm a bit disappointed though that the original desktop version doesn't really play nicely on touchscreens.
wespad 2y ago
Every general purpose Linux desktop I setup gets Simon Tatham's puzzles and all of Kenta Cho's and Jason Rohrer's games.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Kenta Cho - https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ Jason Rohrer - https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ Do distros package these? They should!
  - wespad 2y ago
    Indeed they do. At least the Debian-based distros, like Ubuntu and Mint.
slig 2y ago
Shameless plug: if you enjoy logic puzzles, check out my new puzzle website: https://www.zebrapuzzles.com https://www.zebrapuzzles.com which was recently posted on Show HN [1]. It's playable without JavaScript. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765519
enasterosophes 2y ago
I really like loopy. It has a very stat mech or discrete math feel. I think it could be used to introduce deeper concepts in mathematics to novices, such as proofs, and the question of whether mathematics is constructed or discovered. A lot of the time solving loopy involves noticing re-usable patterns. But how do you know a possible pattern is re-usable? Well, you can prove it, such as with notions from graph theory. The construction vs discovery aspect could be approached in a couple of ways. On the one hand, the loop that you are "discovering" is really only induced by the underlying solutions which the computer has already "constructed." On the other hand, the computer only created the hidden solution using mathematics which was discovered. And on the other other hand, the mathematics which we "discover" is arguably induced by the ZFC etc axioms which we have constructed because of their ability to model consistent reasoning. Other sets of axioms, lacking the flexibility or consistency which we expect from our mathematical models, were discarded, yet would induce different mathematical systems capable of discovery. And the nesting of construction and discovery into each other could continue even deeper ...
- Arainach 2y ago
  For more variations, research papers, implementations, etc. search for its canonical name `Slitherlink`.
  - hirsin 2y ago
    There's an excellent Android version of Slitherlink with multiple variants, well worth the couple bucks to unlock unlimited games beyond the initial couple hundred.
- klez 2y ago
  To be fair, most puzzle games present in the collection are like this. My poison of choice is mostly Light Up (aka Akari). You have patterns you can prove there as well. Other puzzles I like in this collection that have such provable patterns are Pearl, Slant, Tents, Undead and Unruly. And, of course, Mines.
neilv 2y ago
SGT's puzzles has gotten me through so many waiting rooms, from the Nokia E61, onwards. Today, with reliable Internet on my phone, I could instead scroll Fediverse or something, but I figure blazing through puzzles using rules I've learned is more meditative.
th4tg41 2y ago
At least on Android some games are flawed. Never played them on another system. For example Flood can be solved in less turns than the 'calculated' minimum.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  That’s not a calculated minimum. It’s a generous maximum; less-than-optimal play can still win.
V__ 2y ago
Here is a nice version of those puzzles, but more responsive: http://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/ http://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/
- eru 2y ago
  https://www.puzzle-bridges.com/ https://www.puzzle-bridges.com/ also has a lot.
  - sph 2y ago
    Love those from Puzzle Team. Any recommendation for an iOS app with this many curated puzzles, possibly without annoying ads or in-app purchases?
    - eru 2y ago
      Some of the Puzzle Team's puzzle work ok-ish in a web-browser on mobile. (You can pay them a dollar a month to remove the ads.)
- omoikane 2y ago
  Looks like this version is lagging behind slightly (doesn't have "Mosaic" yet), and the "custom" game types are not available.
ink_13 2y ago
I have played a lot of Pearl, and almost as much Unruly and and Keen. I find a custom-sized Pearl board so that it fills as much of my phone screen as possible without getting teeny is just the right length to fill a minute or two. I wanted to play even bigger boards on my tablet, but it seems the puzzle generation algorithm is exponential and asking for a too-big board will crash the app.
- navane 2y ago
  Pearl is my favorite too. I didn't understand the rules described, so I started with figuring out the rules by checking move viability. It still has the strangest ruleset in my opinion: "Black dots go in corners that are attached too straights, white dots go on straights that are next to at least one corner."
rtpg 2y ago
In a similar vein PUZ-PRE is a pencil puzzle JS library supporting loads of Nikoli puzzle types. Loads of puzzle makers make stuff with it. Puzz.link also includes a database of links to puzzles people are playing. For people looking to feel old fashioned, printing out some random puzzles on puzz.link and doing them on pen and paper is sometimes satisfying [0]: http://pzv.jp/ http://pzv.jp/ PUZ-PRE [1]: https://puzz.link/ https://puzz.link/ puzz.link
tromp 2y ago
Previous discussions 2 years ago [1] and 7 years ago [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14232692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14232692
tecleandor 2y ago
I play 'light up' a lot, sometimes before sleeping, it's a kind-of-minesweeper game that doesn't need me to think too hard (unless you go to the most difficult boards) so it doesn't wake me up.
tessellated 2y ago
I have a sweet tooth for 'Light Up'. It's my "go to" while listening to podcasts or audiobooks, when I am not walking the dog or got other things to do. Just gotta be careful to not let the Tetris effect kick in. This is an excellent collection, that should come with every and any OS as a standard installation. Thank you, Simon!

212 points by r2b2 2y ago

The Android version worked very well when I installed it year ago. It was a great choice for someone who does not want to have addictive games installed in the phone, while at the same time enjoy the occasional brain teaser.

viernullvier 2y ago
I have to vehemently disagree with you here - the Android version is the main reason why I needed to set a "no phone in the bedroom" rule for myself.
- fanf2 2y ago
  Simon likes to joke that the time wasted on his puzzle collection has surely cancelled out all the productivity benefits from PuTTY.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Ah, of course, THAT Simon Tatham! That's why his name sounded familiar each time I launched the puzzles... facepalm

mmastrac 2y ago

These are pretty basic to advanced brain puzzles, but there's a few gems in there. Magnets is a lot of fun. Net, Signposts and Tracks are clever puzzles. There was one other one in there I used to enjoy but I can't recall which one it was (maybe Pattern?). They're all about on-par with the level of exciting-ness of Minesweeper and Sudoku. Take that as you wish.

rustcleaner 2y ago

I install this on everything. It is really really good, and IMO the way more games should be made: make a fast simple windowmanager friendly interface presenting puzzles and games in a very pure and unencumbered form. Another example: I love SimCity 2000 for Win95, but not SimCity 3000 or SimCity 4. Why? Wright did 2000 right, the post-EA SimCities were all full screen flashy playskool interface monstrosities. 3000 brought some cool features in, but I wish they had kept to a 2000-like interface. My ideal games look something like Siemens PLM NX or something, and less like a one-armed bandit in Vegas.

II2II 2y ago
Along similar lines, I really enjoyed shapez. Please forgive the blasphemy here, but I never could get into Factorio even though many of the mechanics are similar. (The former allowed me to focus on game play. The latter was a little too grim for my liking.)
- MForster 2y ago
  Is it because of the enemies? FWIW, you can turn them off. I always play with them disabled. Just not what I'm interested in. You might enjoy that, too. I also enjoyed shapez, but it's no comparison to the depth of Factorio, especially with mods.
  - II2II 2y ago
    Thank you. The enemies are a big part of it. I will give turning them off a try.
casenmgreen 2y ago
SC2K had a beautiful interface, I concur, but it was broken as a sim, because of how transport was simulated. Paths were drawn, kind of like ray-traced, from each tile, and at a junction, a random route was taken. There was no directiveness. So for example if you made a little group of roads as a 3x3 set of tiles, practically no routes would exit before timing out by travelling too far, because they would keep taking random exits, and so stay within the 3x3 set of road tiles. As such, you could not build a natural, normal transport system - for example, a central ring road or subway, with routes radiating outwards off of the ring. The only way to build a viable city was to understand how the transport sim worked, and then build a transport layout to fit how it worked.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  As an aside, it really does feel like many games aren't about what they seem to be on the surface. The SimCity series was less about building a city than it was about managing traffic. SimTower was less about property management, and more about elevator management. Factorio is less about building a factory, as it is about resource routing. Or, later, programming trains. Or later, god knows what, I haven't gotten that far. Baldur's Gate III is less about defeating the BBEG through RPG mechanics, and more about choosing who to romance (Karlach).

3836293648 2y ago

I install these on everything and play them to procrastinate all the time. The only issue is that they break entirely with 200% DPI

leni536 2y ago

It has the best version of minesweeper, where every board is solvable.

viernullvier 2y ago
You can also swap primary and secondary clicks (at least in the Android version), which makes it the fastest on touchscreens as well.
- dsvf 2y ago
  Even better, the latest release from a few weeks ago lets you manually set the delay for long press. I've set it for 100ms and can now blaze through mines even faster. But that guaranteed solvable makes it so much better than nondeterministic minesweeper as well.
- leni536 2y ago
  I just never flag the mines.
ooterness 2y ago
There was a Minesweeper variant called Kaboom, where you're playing against a computer that's trying to make you lose. The computer has to comply with all revealed information, but if you ever make a guess, no matter how improbable, it's have over. https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ Previous discussion on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875
- omoikane 2y ago
  There is also Yusuke Endoh's version, where the only thing you do is guess. Computer will automatically mark all the spots where it has enough information to make an inference. https://mame.github.io/minesweeper-spoiled-by-ai/ https://mame.github.io/minesweeper-spoiled-by-ai/
- rahimnathwani 2y ago

RheingoldRiver 2y ago

Bridges (aka "Hashi") is one of my all-time favorite logic puzzles. I recently discovered Galaxies, and I enjoy this one a lot too; I also like Slitherlink (called "Loopy" here) a lot. However this site is missing two that I like quite a bit more, which are Paint by Numbers & Battleships, both of which I originally started doing in Games Magazine and later found on Conceptis Puzzles [0] (they call PbN "Pic-A-Pix") where I bought $25 worth of credits maybe 20 years ago that have still kept me going to this day, every couple years I'll buy a week's puzzle bundle and then slowly go through them. The other one I used to play a lot is Mamono Sweeper [1] One summer in undergrad when I was supposed to be doing graph theory research, instead I got really, really, really good at basic arithmetic by playing this game for 5+ hours a day. This is how I learned that I had no interest in math grad school and I now work as a developer in a video game-adjacent space. Recently I made an online Pentominoes puzzle [2] and I've played it a lot also. If anyone knows a good source of free Paint by Numbers puzzles I would love to hear about it! [0] https://www.conceptispuzzles.com/ https://www.conceptispuzzles.com/ [1] https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper [2] https://pentominoes.river.me https://pentominoes.river.me

votiv 2y ago
I am quite addicted to Suguru puzzles. I hope Simon gets to implement them some time.
tangus 2y ago
SGT's Puzzle Collection does have a limited version of "Paint by Numbers". It's limited tho: only abstract patterns in black and white. It's called "Pattern".
thaumasiotes 2y ago
https://nonograms-katana.com https://nonograms-katana.com seems to have quite a few? I found it by searching for the much more common name "picross".
- Y444 2y ago
  Picross is somehow ended up being a trademark of Nintendo iirc

viernullvier 2y ago

This was one of the first games I installed on my very first Android phone, the Motorola Milestone. 15 years later, I'm still playing it nearly every day. I'm a bit disappointed though that the original desktop version doesn't really play nicely on touchscreens.

wespad 2y ago

Every general purpose Linux desktop I setup gets Simon Tatham's puzzles and all of Kenta Cho's and Jason Rohrer's games.

Y_Y 2y ago
Kenta Cho - https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ Jason Rohrer - https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ Do distros package these? They should!
- wespad 2y ago
  Indeed they do. At least the Debian-based distros, like Ubuntu and Mint.

slig 2y ago

Shameless plug: if you enjoy logic puzzles, check out my new puzzle website: https://www.zebrapuzzles.com https://www.zebrapuzzles.com which was recently posted on Show HN [1]. It's playable without JavaScript. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765519

enasterosophes 2y ago

I really like loopy. It has a very stat mech or discrete math feel. I think it could be used to introduce deeper concepts in mathematics to novices, such as proofs, and the question of whether mathematics is constructed or discovered. A lot of the time solving loopy involves noticing re-usable patterns. But how do you know a possible pattern is re-usable? Well, you can prove it, such as with notions from graph theory. The construction vs discovery aspect could be approached in a couple of ways. On the one hand, the loop that you are "discovering" is really only induced by the underlying solutions which the computer has already "constructed." On the other hand, the computer only created the hidden solution using mathematics which was discovered. And on the other other hand, the mathematics which we "discover" is arguably induced by the ZFC etc axioms which we have constructed because of their ability to model consistent reasoning. Other sets of axioms, lacking the flexibility or consistency which we expect from our mathematical models, were discarded, yet would induce different mathematical systems capable of discovery. And the nesting of construction and discovery into each other could continue even deeper ...

Arainach 2y ago
For more variations, research papers, implementations, etc. search for its canonical name `Slitherlink`.
- hirsin 2y ago
  There's an excellent Android version of Slitherlink with multiple variants, well worth the couple bucks to unlock unlimited games beyond the initial couple hundred.
klez 2y ago
To be fair, most puzzle games present in the collection are like this. My poison of choice is mostly Light Up (aka Akari). You have patterns you can prove there as well. Other puzzles I like in this collection that have such provable patterns are Pearl, Slant, Tents, Undead and Unruly. And, of course, Mines.

neilv 2y ago

SGT's puzzles has gotten me through so many waiting rooms, from the Nokia E61, onwards. Today, with reliable Internet on my phone, I could instead scroll Fediverse or something, but I figure blazing through puzzles using rules I've learned is more meditative.

th4tg41 2y ago

At least on Android some games are flawed. Never played them on another system. For example Flood can be solved in less turns than the 'calculated' minimum.

devilbunny 2y ago
That’s not a calculated minimum. It’s a generous maximum; less-than-optimal play can still win.

V__ 2y ago

Here is a nice version of those puzzles, but more responsive: http://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/ http://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/

eru 2y ago
https://www.puzzle-bridges.com/ https://www.puzzle-bridges.com/ also has a lot.
- sph 2y ago
  Love those from Puzzle Team. Any recommendation for an iOS app with this many curated puzzles, possibly without annoying ads or in-app purchases?
  - eru 2y ago
    Some of the Puzzle Team's puzzle work ok-ish in a web-browser on mobile. (You can pay them a dollar a month to remove the ads.)
omoikane 2y ago
Looks like this version is lagging behind slightly (doesn't have "Mosaic" yet), and the "custom" game types are not available.

ink_13 2y ago

I have played a lot of Pearl, and almost as much Unruly and and Keen. I find a custom-sized Pearl board so that it fills as much of my phone screen as possible without getting teeny is just the right length to fill a minute or two. I wanted to play even bigger boards on my tablet, but it seems the puzzle generation algorithm is exponential and asking for a too-big board will crash the app.

navane 2y ago
Pearl is my favorite too. I didn't understand the rules described, so I started with figuring out the rules by checking move viability. It still has the strangest ruleset in my opinion: "Black dots go in corners that are attached too straights, white dots go on straights that are next to at least one corner."

rtpg 2y ago

In a similar vein PUZ-PRE is a pencil puzzle JS library supporting loads of Nikoli puzzle types. Loads of puzzle makers make stuff with it. Puzz.link also includes a database of links to puzzles people are playing. For people looking to feel old fashioned, printing out some random puzzles on puzz.link and doing them on pen and paper is sometimes satisfying [0]: http://pzv.jp/ http://pzv.jp/ PUZ-PRE [1]: https://puzz.link/ https://puzz.link/ puzz.link

tromp 2y ago

Previous discussions 2 years ago [1] and 7 years ago [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14232692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14232692

tecleandor 2y ago

I play 'light up' a lot, sometimes before sleeping, it's a kind-of-minesweeper game that doesn't need me to think too hard (unless you go to the most difficult boards) so it doesn't wake me up.

tessellated 2y ago

I have a sweet tooth for 'Light Up'. It's my "go to" while listening to podcasts or audiobooks, when I am not walking the dog or got other things to do. Just gotta be careful to not let the Tetris effect kick in. This is an excellent collection, that should come with every and any OS as a standard installation. Thank you, Simon!