Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
15 comments
·July 26, 2025insane_dreamer
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).
MITSardine
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.
tecleandor
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).
NoboruWataya
Recommend the Android port as well, available on F-Droid: https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/
V__
The same puzzles can be played here with a more friendly UI: https://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/
beefsack
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.
ofrzeta
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)
tangus
Also related: https://puzz.link/db/
Disposal8433
And another one: https://www.brainbashers.com/puzzles.asp
3036e4
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.
ggm
I very much hope people link more like this here. My favourite right now is the love solitaire, and jongmah
ZeroGravitas
Mostly works nicely on black and white android e-readers too.
happa
For human-generated logic puzzles that you can solve in your browser, I can recommend the following site:
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.