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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

#51

Post by klez »

enasterosophes wrote: post #18

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…

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.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#52

Post by pavel_lishin »

casenmgreen wrote: post #40
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…

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).

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#53

Post by leni536 »

viernullvier wrote: post #10
leni536 wrote: post #7

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

You can also swap primary and secondary clicks (at least in the Android version), which makes it the fastest on touchscreens as well.

I just never flag the mines.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#54

Post by RheingoldRiver »

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".

there are a lot of apps yea, should've specified I wanna solve in my browser. I like doing gigantic puzzles (like at least 30x50) and seeing the whole board at once
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