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Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

chiark.greenend.org.uk

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Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#31

Post by tangus »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #8

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") wh…

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".

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#32

Post by rahimnathwani »

ooterness wrote: post #17
leni536 wrote: post #7

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

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/ Previous discussion on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875

This reminds me of absurdle:

https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#33

Post by thaumasiotes »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #8

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") wh…

https://nonograms-katana.com seems to have quite a few?

I found it by searching for the much more common name "picross".

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#34

Post by ygra »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #32
ooterness wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ Previous discussion on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875

This reminds me of absurdle: https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

Or the more evil version: https://dontwordle.com/

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#35

Post by kevindamm »

leni536 wrote: post #7

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

It also has a glaring wart in its API because of Minesweeper needing to allow the first click before deciding the layout of the puzzle.

I've sometimes thought of adding a puzzle to this collection but I would actually rather refactor everything to remove that wart. It would involve turning Minesweeper into a game with a foyer, but probably worth doing?

Also, I thought the modern Windows version of minesweeper did the same first-click-is-free logic?

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#36

Post by rtpg »

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/ PUZ-PRE [1]: https://puzz.link/ puzz.link

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#37

Post by MForster »

II2II wrote: post #27
rustcleaner wrote: post #4

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 b…

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.)

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.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#38

Post by Y444 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #33
RheingoldRiver wrote: post #8

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") wh…

https://nonograms-katana.com seems to have quite a few? I found it by searching for the much more common name "picross".

Picross is somehow ended up being a trademark of Nintendo iirc

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#39

Post by thaumasiotes »

Y444 wrote: post #38
thaumasiotes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://nonograms-katana.com seems to have quite a few? I found it by searching for the much more common name "picross".

Picross is somehow ended up being a trademark of Nintendo iirc

Trademarking a generic term (that is descriptive of your product) has no legal relevance, even if the term is not generic at the time you trademark it.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#40

Post by casenmgreen »

rustcleaner wrote: post #4

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 b…

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.

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