Nikoli Puzzles | Hacker News Reader

Nikoli Puzzles

nikoli.co.jp

150 pointsS4M24 comments

A bunch of these are also available in the venerable Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Didn't realize Tatham is the Putty guy, nice !

I also really like the collection of games at https://www.puzzle-nonograms.com – linked is the one I play the most.

I got into these type of puzzles with Picross DS (on the Nintendo DS). I also recommend: https://www.hanjie-star.com/

And for fans of Konami games, this app is fun too: https://www.konami.com/games/us/en/products/pixelpuzzle/

I've wasted eons on Slant. I love opening up a huge field on hard and clicking away at my virtual rock garden.

Which also exists on Android as a pretty light app: https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/

And apparently there's an app for iOS too.

The iOS app is my favorite timekiller. It doesn't hide the clock, it starts up really fast (no splash screen), it has no ads, it uses only 3.7MB storage, and it's free.

link?

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/simon-tathams-portable-puzzl...

There's an Austrian site with a massive variety of puzzles like these, all playable online for free: https://www.janko.at/Raetsel/Uebersicht.htm

It's mostly in German, but each game page usually has a rules section in English and links to other sites with the same puzzle type.

Slitherlink is incredible, you learn to recognize more and more patterns. And when you have mastered one variant, you can try with honeycomb pattern instead of squares or other shapes to explore new patterns.

Light up/Akari I have never quite gotten. It's either too simple or too hard, after learning the common patterns. I often end up just trying to fill in something, and backtrack when it doesn't work. Not as satisfying as deducing it would have been.

Hitori is nice, albeit a bit easy after having found the patterns. But relaxing to just comb through a few puzzles.

Shikaku, I prefer Tentai Show which is similar but arbitrary rotatable shapes instead, a bit nicer patterns to learn.

> Slitherlink is incredible

To an outsider, it looks a bit like minesweeper.

Most of these games are constraint-games, including minesweeper. So I wouldn't be surprised if they can be reduced to each other, or at least sort-of. When playing the puzzle collection by Tatham linked here, I often find that new patterns I find in one type of puzzle can be reused in others.

Slitherlink is very cool! Do you know a source of Slitherlink puzzles in computer-readable form? I've got the urge to write a solver.

Why not write a generator first? :)

It's called "Loopy" in Simon Tatham's puzzle collection (see my other comment), it's open source and includes a level generator.

The most fun part is when you get to use the Jordan curve theorem (using the parity of an intersecting ray).

There’s a nice online collection of these style puzzles at https://www.brainbashers.com/today.asp. I usually do the hardest Slitherlink, Hitori, and Ranges problems daily, for years now.

I have a book of these on my desk right now. If you are not in Japan, I highly recommend ordering directly from the publisher. The books usually have English rules, but if not they are available on the website. It is really nice taking a break from screens and chipping away at a few puzzles.

The well known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_Free is like the ColorLink version of Numberlink.

A huge browser-playable collection of Nikoli and other puzzles are at https://www.janko.at/Raetsel/Nikoli/index-2.htm

What about Ken Ken? Is it also considered a Nikoli puzzle?

If I've researched this correctly, I believe that "Nikoli puzzles" are not a formal class of puzzles; rather the terms refers specifically to the publisher of these puzzles [1]. KenKen, on the other hand, was invented and trademarked separately by Tetsuya Miyamoto [2].

That being said, KenKen does seem to fall into a similar class of constraint-based, language-agnostic games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikoli_(publisher) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KenKen

Ken Ken differs from most of them in that it actually has math, whereas in the other games the numbers are really just symbols that could be anything (sudoku) or just counts (loopy/slitherlink, I think).

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