"Galaxies" is the one I keep coming back to. It has the property that computer-generated instances of it are often satisfying, with distinct "aha" moments where everything falls into place.
That's not true for all logic puzzles -- many Nikoli-style puzzles can be clever when designed by humans but are tedious when designed by computers.
Same here. I only install a handful of apps in my phone, and this is one of them. One wrapping-11x11 game of "Net" is just right for my short subway commute.
When you read the word "portable," you'd better believe it. The entire project is designed for elegance and simplicity, and the developer docs are a pleasure to read.
The topic of Minesweeper seems to come up on HN quite often, so it might be worth noting that Simon's implementation ensures that "you are guaranteed to be able to solve the whole grid by deduction rather than guesswork."
Not sure about computer, but I'm installed this on every single phone I've had since my HTC Dream (very first android phone).
It honestly is the perfect "portable" game to kill 15m here or there. I've been playing it for over 8 years now and I still keep cycling through. And the controls on phones are pretty well made too.
I love almost all the games in the pack. That feeling you get when you solve your very first Sudoku, and then the next 10 when you slowly discovery new "strategies"? Well you can have that feeling many many times over with this! That's how I introduce this to people.
I remember being so excited to play this on my GBA as homebrew! Good times. Sadly, smartphones have ruined the joy of these fun, simple games for me. I miss the days when installing custom puzzles on your mobile device felt like an adventure.
This is the only "game" I have on my phone. Years later I'll still sometimes stumble on a strategy I never noticed before, in one or another of the puzzles.
I love this collection and have worked my way through most of them. It ranges from the easy and instantly enjoyable (untangle) through to those which even after a lot of playing the higher levels can be frustratingly hard to solve (eg towers). In the middle are some you can learn the tricks for (eg maps) and others where theres always something different (eg galaxies). Theres also a good mix of the familiar and unfamiliar.
If you like this, you might want to check out Nikoli (http://www.nikoli.com/en/). They're a Japanese puzzle company and they put out new puzzles every single day, all designed by humans. The only real downside to their site is it uses Flash.
I have no affiliation with them, I've just been a happy subscriber for a long time.
To clarify: A bunch of the puzzles in Simon Tatham's collection are also puzzles that Nikoli does. I haven't checked to see if all of Nikoli's puzzles are in the collection though.
I'm a huge fan of Slant; I like generating and solving huge puzzles with that.
There are some high-level reasoning rules you can use to solve Slant puzzles more quickly. For instance, if you have two 1s orthogonally adjacent, the slants on the opposite faces must not touch the 1s:
/ ? \
1 1
\ ? /
And if you have 3s in the same situation, the outside slants must both touch the 3s:
\ ? /
3 3
/ ? \
There are several more rules like that, which make it much faster to solve.
I really like "Loopy", but prefer the variant with hexagons/honeycomb. Got it downloaded on my phone as "Slitherlink". Very nice, abstract game where you constantly see new patterns.
Yes, but still not as good as a the standalone Slitherlink (which also has lots if variants). What I miss the most is easy navigation with one hand, different colors on the links so I know which ones belong together without zooming out, marking the numbers differently when their constraints are okey, and the ability to mark areas as outside or inside.
I also feel something is a bit off with the generated games, but that might be me being used to another generator.
Some of these are seriously addicting, and it's no surprise that many of them have been shamelessly copied and sold as smartphone apps. Galaxies is probably my favorite.
This is a silly question, but: some of these games have right-click actions, which I find I cannot perform on a Mac OS X system by holding Control and clicking. Is there some other way I should be trying to right-click?
* - see if we can do anything to one-button-ise the multi-button
* dependent puzzle UIs:
* - Pattern is a _little_ unwieldy but not too bad (since
* generally you never need the middle button unless you've
* made a mistake, so it's just click versus command-click).
One thing I've noticed, if you're on a phone with force/3D touch, you have to hold much longer than usual on the left edge of the screen to do a hold action, because of the app switching feature
I definitely have much better experience with the Android version than the iOS version. The iOS version has somewhat poorer control where a sliding motion is used. The display wants to slide in that case rather than the game control being used.
That's not true for all logic puzzles -- many Nikoli-style puzzles can be clever when designed by humans but are tedious when designed by computers.