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Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

chiark.greenend.org.uk

1–10 of 54 posts

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#3
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.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#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 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.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#6
post #2

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.

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.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#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") 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/

[1] https://hojamaka.com/games/mamono_sweeper

[2] https://pentominoes.river.me

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