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.

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).

Recommend the Android port as well, available on F-Droid: https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/

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.

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.

Simon Tatham also wrote PuTTY, which was for the longest time the best SSH client on Windows (I don't use Windows anymore so I can't say if it still is or not). I can't find the quote now, but I remember him saying that between PuTTY and his puzzle collection, his contribution to human productivity was net zero

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/

Given how many platforms these have been ported to, this really is the DOOM of puzzle apps. I've been using this PocketBook port on my e-reader for years: https://github.com/SteffenBauer/PocketPuzzles

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.

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)

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).

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 :)

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...

The same puzzles can be played here with a more friendly UI: https://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/

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.

For human-generated logic puzzles that you can solve in your browser, I can recommend the following site:

https://puzsq.logicpuzzle.app

if somebody wants a "C lang/linux 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

the bug: anyway, I was running the C version of the puzzle from cli (didn't want to slow my browser down) 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.

I love these puzzles. I find the cube rolling one just so hard to get my head around!

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.

Mostly works nicely on black and white android e-readers too.

Found this recently and have been loving it! The one that has stuck the most is Keen but Galaxies is a close second.

I actually might want to port this to homebrew Switch… Good summer project

Thanks for sharing! Awesome new time sinkhole for my phone…

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.