Introduction
This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games. All of them run natively on Unix (GTK), on Windows, and on Mac OS X. They can also be played on the web, as Java or Javascript applets.
I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing. And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn't available the next time I was sitting at a Windows machine, or vice versa; so I arranged that everything in my personal puzzle collection will happily run on both those platforms and more. When I find (or perhaps invent) further puzzle games that I like, they'll be added to this collection and will immediately be available on both platforms. And if anyone feels like writing any other front ends for platforms I don't support (which people already have) then all the games in this framework will immediately become available on another platform as well.
The games
The actual games in this collection were mostly not my invention; they are re-implementations of existing game concepts within my portable puzzle framework. I do not claim credit, in general, for inventing the rules of any of these puzzles. (I don't even claim authorship of all the code; some of the puzzles below have been submitted by other authors.)
Below each image are two links to versions of the puzzle you can play
on the web. The 'java' link goes to a Java applet, which you can play
in your browser if you have a working Java plugin. There's also a link
marked 'js', which links to an alternative web version written in
Javascript using asm.js; those versions are new as of
March 2013 and have been somewhat tested in Firefox 19, Chrome 26,
Internet Explorer 10 and Safari 6.
Also below each image is a link to the Windows binary for the game, and a link to the manual. For all other platforms, the games are provided in a single bundle, so scroll down to theDownload section to get them all.
Licence
This game collection is copyright 2004-2012 Simon Tatham (portions copyright Richard Boulton, James Harvey, Mike Pinna, Jonas Kölker, Dariusz Olszewski, Michael Schierl, Lambros Lambrou, Bernd Schmidt, Steffen Bauer, Lennard Sprong and Rogier Goossens). It is all distributed under the MIT licence. This means that you can do pretty much anything you like with the game binaries or the code, except pretending you wrote them yourself, or suing me if anything goes wrong.Here are Windows executables of the puzzle games in the
collection. (On Windows only, the Net executable is called
"netgame.exe" in order to avoid clashing with Windows's
own "net.exe". The name of the game is still
"Net" :-)
blackbox.exe | bridges.exe | cube.exe | dominosa.exe | fifteen.exe
filling.exe | flip.exe | flood.exe | galaxies.exe | guess.exe
inertia.exe | keen.exe | lightup.exe | loopy.exe | magnets.exe
map.exe | mines.exe | netgame.exe | netslide.exe | palisade.exe
pattern.exe | pearl.exe | pegs.exe | range.exe | rect.exe
samegame.exe | signpost.exe | singles.exe | sixteen.exe | slant.exe
solo.exe | tents.exe | towers.exe | tracks.exe | twiddle.exe
undead.exe | unequal.exe | unruly.exe | untangle.exe
Here are some Windows help files. If you install these in the same directory as the executable files, then each game should display a "Help" menu giving help about the game collection in general and that game in particular. You can also browse the same documentation online in HTML format.
(The help file is available in a choice of two formats. The.CHM file is HTML Help, supported by Win98 and above;
the .HLP and .CNT files are old-style
WinHelp, supported by everything from Win95 up to WinXP but not by
Vista. The HTML help file is the recommended one, and the puzzles
will use it by preference if both are available.)
HTML Help:
puzzles.chm
WinHelp:puzzles.hlp |puzzles.cnt
Here is a .zip file containing all of the above
Windows binaries and the help file.
Here is a Windows MSI installer.
(This MSI installer is unfortunately not inter-compatible with the old Windows executable installer package I used to provide here, so if you still have the old one installed, you'll have to uninstall it before installing the MSI version. Sorry about that.)
Here is a Mac OS X disk image file, containing a single monolithic application called "Puzzles". You should be able to download and open the disk image, then drag the Puzzles application to wherever you feel like keeping it; it should be entirely self-contained.
Here is a source archive of the collection, which should allow you to compile the games on any Unix system supporting GTK. (At least, I hope so; I've only tested it on Linux so far, and I wouldn't rule out portability issues on other types of Unix.)
Some people have ported this puzzle collection to various mobile devices. Here are some links to their port pages:
(Note that these are third-party ports, not maintained by me. If you have trouble with one of these, you should probably follow the link to the appropriate maintainer's page and contact them about the problem in the first instance.)Development
All of these puzzles are written in C, with a porting interface so that the same back-end puzzle code can talk to wildly different graphical front ends. The source archive above includes native GUI front ends for Windows and Mac OS X, an X front end using theGTK+ library, and a mixed C/Java front end for compiling the puzzles into Java applets usingNestedVM.
There is extensive developer documentation describing the cross-platform interfaces. If you want to write a new puzzle or a new front end (to make all these games run on another platform), this is probably the place to start.
If you want to see the latest state of development, you can check
the development sources out from my git repository:
git clone https://git.tartarus.org/simon/puzzles.gitAlternatively, you can browse the repository on the web,here.
Feedback
Please report bugs toanakin@pobox.com.
If your bug report involves a particular puzzle being faulty (if you think it has no solution, or more than one solution), please send a saved game file if possible, using the ‘Game > Save’ menu option, or equivalent. Saved game files are much more useful (and smaller) than graphical screenshots: they contain all the information I need to reproduce the game generation and find out what went wrong.
If you can't do that (e.g. if you're playing on the web, which has no save-game feature), please at least copy and paste both the random seed and the game description (from the ‘Random Seed’ and ‘Specific’ menu options, or the ‘Enter game ID’ and ‘Enter random seed’ buttons in the Javascript games).
Also, you might find it helpful to readthis article before reporting a bug.
Patches are welcome.
(comments to anakin@pobox.com)
(thanks tochiark for hosting this page)
(last modified on Mon May 1 01:46:56 2017)