Strong +1 to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. One note: the main iOS app is a little wonky in places. I've been using Kyle Swarmer's "Puzzles Reloaded" app, which is a little nicer in places.
The MacOS build on the page is quite old, and doesn't reflect recent fixes/enhancements. If you want to build it from source for MacOS the included instructions won't work because Simon's 'halibut' documentation tool will be missing.
2) Build the puzzles app, pointing CMake at that halibut binary. Do this in a fresh build dir (don't reuse a stale top-level CMakeCache.txt that already recorded HALIBUT-NOTFOUND):
I install Simon's collection on every device of mine, as well as PySol.
(I'm stuck on Guess aka Mastermind right now, and damn good at it if I say so myself! Also Solo aka Sudoku on 6 sub-blocks, with X+Jigsaw+Killer & No symmetry+Unreasonable difficulty.)
I feel like I shouldn't need to say this, but Simon is also the Author of the awesome PuTTY. Until fairly recently, a vital tool of anyone doing remote management from Windows.
I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.
The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.
Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
// Fire view events (e.g. unlock_prompt_viewed) for any monetization prompt
// present in the freshly loaded page. data-analytics-view-events is a JSON
// array so one rendered prompt can report several events at once.
Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
> Create a free account to keep playing. Sign up or log in to create an account, save your progress, and continue this difficulty.
And here we are again. A nice idea, ai generated, for grabbing email addresses... Not even trying to give it a human touch. Is this the new spam? Hundreds of sites and web apps forcing you to sign up with a temp email address for no good reason?
After starting a nonogram level, it seems you can't go back to it because you're just prompted to sign up or log in. As mentioned already they're also shitty puzzles.
104 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadReaders may also enjoy Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, available for mobile as well: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
(My favorite currently is Dominosa. Playing the Hard mode is teaching me new patterns.)
So you need to:
1) Build Halibut from source:
2) Build the puzzles app, pointing CMake at that halibut binary. Do this in a fresh build dir (don't reuse a stale top-level CMakeCache.txt that already recorded HALIBUT-NOTFOUND): 3) Now you have build-osx/Puzzles.app and can (optionally) build the dmg:(I'm stuck on Guess aka Mastermind right now, and damn good at it if I say so myself! Also Solo aka Sudoku on 6 sub-blocks, with X+Jigsaw+Killer & No symmetry+Unreasonable difficulty.)
My favorite is pearl.
I had intended to add more solitaire games but moved on to other projects. At the time it was an excuse for me to learn Javascript.
Plan to keep it forever free :)
And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
https://imgur.com/a/aOnKbiT
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
And here we are again. A nice idea, ai generated, for grabbing email addresses... Not even trying to give it a human touch. Is this the new spam? Hundreds of sites and web apps forcing you to sign up with a temp email address for no good reason?
Testing AI model's ability to solve puzzles like these. https://ppbench.com/
Can play the puzzles and compare your timing and accuracy to many AI models on the leaderboards
Only after you create an account? Oh my lord