Weirdly I find the 15x15 puzzles to be easier in general than the 6x6 ones. Maybe it is because the 15x15 ones aren't packed as tightly so you don't have to use as much second order logic?
The only suggestion I would make is have a middle click that marks a spot as a possibility.
> I think NP-Completeness is the norm rather than the exception.
I don't think that's possible. Being NP-complete means a problem is as hard as any NP problem, and no harder. But there's not an upper limit to how difficult a problem can be.
Note that the problem of determining whether two different regular expressions match the same set of strings is much harder than any NP-complete problem.
When you think about the class of things that humans consider to be "fun logic puzzles", NP-Completeness seems more common, since it encapsulates broadly the set of puzzles that require a certain amount of brute-force to find a solution to, and any reasonably entertaining human-solvable puzzle is easy to verify that something is in fact a solution.
Thank you for making it mobile-friendly. I almost made my own Android version of this just because the usual site I played it on wasn't usable and the best I could find in the Play store was mostly there to sell you $1.99 packs of 50 puzzles as if there was any actual effort put into generating them (seriously, they acted like 1 free puzzle per week was generosity).
Although can we get a setting to switch left and right click's default actions? I prefer puzzle games like this to use "click where there is something, right click to mark where there isn't something".
Having two mouse buttons available for two actions would make sense, except that right-clicking on the puzzle brings up a context menu. So regardless of the swapmouse setting, only the left click is a real possibility.
It was the exact same puzzle that's in the OP. With the scale of available puzzles they had for sale, I'm fairly confident it was automated (they also weren't noticably different from the generated puzzles I played before).
I find the implementation of dragging really annoying compared to similar engines. What I'm used to is:
* click and drag will only operate in a single line, either horizontally or vertically
* click and drag will only perform the same operation (considering both original type and new type). In particular, if I've already filled in every other cell as water, dragging in "ship" mode should only fill in the empty cells, not overwrite the water.
* there should be "undo" support, both Ctrl-Z and U as well as a button
Another feature usually not found in similar engines, but really useful in order to regain some of the experience from solving them on paper:
* have a nearby text box for keeping notes; clear it when a new puzzle is started
Having click and drag not be limited to a line is actually useful for ringing around a completed ship. You can tap a number clue on the outside to fill in the missing water, which can help avoid needing to draw long straight lines.
But having it only perform the same action would make things nicer.
Bimaru is a fun puzzle. I remember putting an Android App in the store containing the phrase "Battleships", only to receive a copyright claim from Hasbro, and Google immediately took the App down from the Store.
This doesn't work for me on Firefox Mobile on Android at 10x10 or above. It's as if the touch targets get too small to select: I can click on the numbers to turn them red, but I can't seem to select any square.
Works well on smaller sizes and on Chrome on the same device.
Thanks, weird one - I just put in a fix, you can refresh the page to get it. Some kind of CSS glitch where the cells (<i> elements) got a height of 0 at narrow screen sizes, in Firefox only, despite those and their parent <td>s having an explicit height. Just added an absolute positioning hack to fix it.
Given the rules, it would be a better experience if squares only have two states: ship block or empty. There is no point to letting the user draw water. The feature probably exists with the intent of letting users mark squares that can't possibly be ships, but why wouldn't the game do that step by itself based on the blocks placed? That would make the game a lot less tedious.
It's indeed the way it is so that you can indicate a square that must be water. What you propose sounds like a solver to me, and I much prefer solving it myself.
It seems to be intentional. (I was confused by this at first, too). If your starting grid contains, e.g., a dot, you can safely assume it's a one-ship. But if you add a ship, the initial state is a block that resolves to a dot or end as appropriate when you complete it.
I think "doesn't engage the language center of my brain" is more accurate (and less pejorative) than "mindless". It certainly engages spatial reasoning and some logic.
I think there's a bug. If we have two two-length ships, that are next to each other in a connected in an "L" shape, it's not possible to define it on the board.
having played a lot of this puzzle on https://www.puzzle-battleships.com/ ... I'd love a couple QoL improvements, one from there and one to be better than that one
- counters for columns/rows would be a nice idea to steal
- inverse control (so, lmb for ship) would help with not interfering with default behaviour, for people switching to/from different puzzles
Also ship helper really should come with each type on its own line - your listing is harder to parse than on that website
Nice! In line with other apps like this (e.g. LinkedIn's queens), I think the grid should be marked complete once you have all the boats, without needing to mark all the water.
I've spent quite a few hours on this thing when I've needed something non-linguistic for my brain to engage in. If it was World of Warcraft, I'd probably be a level 30 rogue.
Author here - check that the revealed ships in your puzzle are keeping their particular shape. E.g. a revealed-at-start "D" shape ship-end can't be the middle of a ship, or an "O" submarine, or face a different way that it's initially facing. 99.9% of the time people report this, it's a confusion about that aspect (if you can think of a way I can make it clearer definitely let me know!).
The simplest way would be to also pre-fill forced empty spaces. It 'solves' part of the puzzle for the player, but hopefully that wasn't a key part of the fun. You go as far as to explain all of those bits at the bottom anyway.
This kind of thing is done to great effect in "Good Sudoku", which gives players a lot of automated tools for the simplest things, as to lead players to handling the more fun, more complicated parts of the hard puzzles.
I think the easiest way to make it clearer is to highlight it in red as a mistake if done incorrectly, as you do with the counts on the row ends. If you try to place a ship token close to another one then you should also highlight it in red.
The only suggestion I would make is have a middle click that marks a spot as a possibility.
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