[HN Gopher] Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
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Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
Author : sogen
Score : 174 points
Date : 2025-07-26 06:46 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chiark.greenend.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chiark.greenend.org.uk)
| 3036e4 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sheiyei wrote:
| 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)
| ggm wrote:
| I very much hope people link more like this here. My favourite
| right now is the love solitaire, and jongmah
|
| https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=95641
|
| https://www.jongmah.com/
| beefsack wrote:
| 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.
| happa wrote:
| For human-generated logic puzzles that you can solve in your
| browser, I can recommend the following site:
|
| https://puzsq.logicpuzzle.app
| tecleandor wrote:
| 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).
| pbh101 wrote:
| Found this recently and have been loving it! The one that has
| stuck the most is Keen but Galaxies is a close second.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Recommend the Android port as well, available on F-Droid:
| https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Mostly works nicely on black and white android e-readers too.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| 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)
| tangus wrote:
| Also related: https://puzz.link/db/
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| And another one: https://www.brainbashers.com/puzzles.asp
| MITSardine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MITSardine wrote:
| I think there's still a unique solution but, on the
| harder difficulties, you're given very little to work
| with. (in Towers)
| fsckboy wrote:
| i only play Net (largest size or bigger, wrapping) using the
| locks; I disconnect the surrounding pipes from the center so
| nothing is lit up, and then start locking squares based on
| their surroundings. some of them I can't even solve. I can
| see the answer, but my head can't contain the logic necessary
| to lock them down
| Jigsy wrote:
| 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.
| V__ wrote:
| The same puzzles can be played here with a more friendly UI:
| https://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/
| fsckboy wrote:
| not exactly the same, the ux cleanup has dumbed some of them
| down a bit
|
| I play the original untangle on 600 or higher, that "friendly"
| UI doesn't allow that
|
| I play the original Dominosa 6-extreme but friendly doesn't
| offer that either, unless it's set them all to extreme
|
| the Net doesn't not allow custom sizes, and it's also broken
| the mouse buttons, it only allows rotation in one direction
|
| not going to look further into the vandalism
| cbarrick wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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).
| glimshe wrote:
| Teaching kids to program for over 40 years:
|
| https://www.roug.org/retrocomputing/languages/basic/basicgam...
| npteljes wrote:
| 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.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| 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.
| merelysounds wrote:
| 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...
| zellyn wrote:
| 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?
| merelysounds wrote:
| 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 :)
| jannniii wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Awesome new time sinkhole for my phone...
| haunter wrote:
| I actually might want to port this to homebrew Switch... Good
| summer project
| patrickdavey wrote:
| I love these puzzles. I find the cube rolling one just so hard to
| get my head around!
| fsckboy wrote:
| I got really good at the spatial reasoning a few years ago (not
| perfect though) but now I can't remember any of that and I'm
| back to n00b again
| wkat4242 wrote:
| We used to have these kinds of puzzles physically in the 80s.
| Little plastic pocket Chess boards etc with pieces that would
| stick in there with a Pin. Never thought of them until i read
| this :)
| dfboyd wrote:
| The iOS app is long-unmaintained and has bugs. It needs a new
| maintainer, but they need some kind of Apple developer account to
| actually get it in the app store.
| fsckboy wrote:
| if somebody wants a "C lang level" bug/puzzle to figure out
| (could be as simple as looking at the source), I just discovered
| it a couple days ago: if you use a large number to set up a board
| in untangle, the algo is extremely slow to set the board up,
| probably an O(N*2) or worse or something. You can see this
| slowness in the web version, put in a 600 or 2000
|
| anyway, I was running the C version of the puzzle from cli and I
| must have put a typo in for an even bigger number than I intended
| and the process went away for a long time. I got sick of looking
| at the little window and discovered that I couldn't kill it even
| with kill -9. I killed the window with xkill but the process was
| still chugging away in the background at 99% CPU.
|
| I finally managed to kill it with htop but I have a sense that I
| didn't really kill it, I think it just finished whatever long ops
| it was doing.
|
| I didn't test much more, but I did load up a board size 600 to
| play and confirmed while it was building the board, kill -9
| didn't do anything, and after it finished it allowed me to play
| the game. the kill -9 was swallowed and gone.
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(page generated 2025-07-26 23:01 UTC)