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pavel_lishin
zellyn
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.
tunesmith
Wow, didn't know this existed until today. Thanks!
rustcleaner
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.)
penr0se
Mine is currently Net, 7x7 grid with wrapping variant. I take about 5 minutes on average to solve a level, which is the sweet spot for me
pavel_lishin
Oh, this is kinda fun, I'm gonna play with it for a bit!
patrickdavey
Yeah, this collection is _awesome_. I'm currently enjoying the Towers (just do it on 5x5 simple, and find it quite relaxing!).
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navane
This one is so good. Original puzzles, works fine on mobile. Very future proof.
My favorite is pearl.
rahimnathwani
[flagged]
zx8080
> Create a free account to keep playing.
After 3 attempts (all moves were mistakes! maybe I'm too stupid?) asked for my email.
Is emails collection the end-goal of this (vibe-coded, I suppose) page?
blourvim
I have been playing nonograms for a year now, there was never insta death, controls are a little off, title is hidden until its solved to avoid spoilers This is obviously programmed by someone who doesn't play nonograms. Safe to assume it was vibe-coded
underyx
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.
miguel-muniz
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.
HaxleRose
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.
pred_
I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.
And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.
HaxleRose
I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.
youre-wrong3
It’s not fair criticism. It’s just anti ai rhetoric.
jimmypk
[dead]
giancarlostoro
I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.
HaxleRose
I do the same with new models.
benrutter
> the front page is full of LLM smells
I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.
accrual
I saw it immediately as well. Some tells for me are:
- Off-white or sepia toned backgrounds, similar subdued color palette for icons, grey ALL CAPS subheadings
- Serifed headings
- Various "Item: Quantity" lists (Puzzle types: 10, Puzzles solved: 1,951, etc.)
- Middle dot character for separator
One common tell it is lacking is the placement of colored dots or circles in the corners of panels or other UI elements, sometimes animated/pulsing.
To be clear it's not bad, it's a clean and friendly style. It just has that certain look, like a visual "it's not X it's Y".
celsoazevedo
The UI of this site is similar to what Claude likes to generate. The fonts and text style, for example, scream of Claude Opus/Fable.
shevy-java
I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.
circuitqed
My family and I went down a very similar path, we were tired of all the ads and dark patterns when we just wanted to play simple puzzle games. We made a pretty similar site/app
going there on an ios device will give you a link to the app store, both the site and app are free to use.
It has several puzzle games already and we're trying to release around one new one per month. Any feedback is welcome.
zeroonetwothree
Crossjam is a fun one!
smiles4miles
Love it! My only feedback is the many-squared puzzles are hard to play on a phone without a stylus (accidental misclicks are challenging with the small box size)
danpalmer
Where are you sourcing all your puzzles?
I remember the blocker to a Sudoku app I was making in secondary school was just getting good puzzles. They're hard to make, particularly if you're signing up to make a new one every day. I guess you could create them with AI now, but you'd run significant risk of them being uncalibrated for difficulty or just outright invalid.
tgv
I always thought people generated sudokus with heuristics, e.g. the less numbers remain, the harder it is.
rmunn
Based on the title, I was expecting the things I grew up calling logic puzzles, which some people call "logic grid" puzzles, e.g. https://www.allstarpuzzles.com/logic/00019.html (note: expired HTTPS certificate, but site doesn't ask for any login or anything, it just displays the puzzles) or https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/
When I was a kid, learning programming, I toyed with writing my own logic-puzzle solver program, but the challenge of turning words on their side defeated me at the time. Now it's just one line of CSS. :-)
Would you be interested in adding logic puzzles / logic grid puzzles? They're not that hard to create automatically; spend long enough on https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/ and you'll definitely notice that those puzzles are being auto-generated by an algorithm.
largbae
Also great and ad-free: https://cluesbysam.com/
My daughter and I play it most nights, and she has been developing her deductive reasoning quickly enough that she occasionally sees the next move first now.
furyofantares
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.
HaxleRose
Yep, I feel ya. Good feedback. This is like version 3 of the home page. The first two looked very typical AI. I thought maybe a newspaper vibe might be cool as a throwback to the puzzles you'd do in the paper. But it does have some of those cookie cutter AI tells. I'm a software engineer by trade and not much of a designer honestly. This probably won't be the final form of the home page, I'd imagine.
furyofantares
I mean, it does look cool. Felt unique when I had landed on it. But then I saw another site that looked identical to mine and I moved on.
I'm the same as you, not much of a designer, I was kind of elated when I got some good, themed, opinionated designs for some of my sites that felt like it was coming out of a collaborative brainstorming session, and matched the vibe I wanted. And then let down when I worked out there's only a limited number of things I can get the LLM to express, and it's gonna be similar for others.
cochleari_major
I'll plug a little page that I (well, Claude) put together for bite-sized 4x4 Sudoku puzzles mixing popular variant constraints: https://yakymp.github.io/sudoku4x4/
cbxyp
I did the same with a few of my favorite casino games (and to save some money)
https://roulette.free/ https://blackjack.free/ https://baccarat.free/
little less heady than your site! but i still enjoy to play the games for free lol
FailMore
Nice, mobile layouts could improve… couldn’t bet in roulette
aji
the star battle interface diverges from penpa, puzpre, and puzzleteam in a number of basic ways that actively make the solving experience worse imo:
- having to switch between "star" and "exclude" modes is annoying on desktop, and most sites allow right click for placing "exclude" marks. it was a surprise that right click not only popped up the context menu but also placed a star (in a wrong spot, of course).
- counting mistakes doesn't make sense for a binary determination puzzle like star battle imo (or most logic puzzles for that matter). solving on paper doesn't count mistakes so what does a digital solving interface gain by doing so?
as someone who does a lot of logic puzzles (and thus would be in the market for buying a puzzle set) these usability obstacles make the inclusion of star battle feel like an afterthought.
f311a
Exactly, I also prefer when neighboring cells are automatically marked when you place a star
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This is nice!
Readers 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.)