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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I liked how he realized two possibilities for a number that were next to each other, also meant the box around it could be cleared.

I really enjoy finding patterns like these in constraint games. After confirming the pattern for myself a number of times, the brain later just does it on autopilot. If people have tips for similar games I would be happy to try them.

Edit, my tips: Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection [0] has lots of them. Apps exists for mobile devices as well. Everett Caser [1] also have lots of logic games where one can learn patterns. I've played Sherlock and Honeycomb, and my favorite is Willa's Walk. They look a bit funky, but the apps work fine on Android.

[0]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ [1]: http://www.kaser.com/ww.html

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I am a huge fan of Simon Tatham's puzzles. His developer documentation [0] is absolutely amazing. All the puzzles are written in very high quality C with, in my opinion, a perfect ratio of comments to code [1].

I was hooked on his Tents [2] puzzle for a few weeks, then I started modifying the code to automatically fill in squares based on the tricks I found for adding constraints. Before I knew it, I had written a complete solver! Now I don't have to waste my time on it and I can get back to work :)

[0]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/

[1]: https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=blob;f=tents...

[2]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/tent...

There's a book called "Puzzle Ninja: Pit Your Wits Against The Japanese Puzzle Masters" that covers these strategies for a bunch of similar games, as well as background info on the creators and examples of the puzzle try.

However, I've found that discovering these strategies myself is actually the bit I like most, so although I've bought the book, I try not to read about the strategies I haven't figured out by myself.

If you're into that feeling, learning a game like go might be something you'd enjoy. There's other parts to the game, but finding clever tactical moves is a huge rush of that.

There's also books and sites with "go problems", chosen puzzle positions, for a quick fix (but only after you know the game a bit).

Hey I made a website with books full of go problems. It's become quite popular: https://tsumego.tasuki.org/

It's non-interactive not just because I'm lazy, but also there's some reasoning for why you should solve problems rather than click around and randomly try things out :)

Thanks for your site! I've been there before. I really like the Cho problems.

Cho Chikun is the popular one. My favourite is Gokyo Shumyo!

Good suggestion. I already play chess and enjoy solving "tactics".

> Yeah, I liked how he realized two possibilities for a number that were next to each other, also meant the box around it could be cleared.

This struck me as a bit weird (as he's clearly 100% sharp): this is just the application of the same rule he had been applying everywhere else: if a number can be in one of two squares than anything that can reach those two by king or knight cannot be correct. He doesn't need to use speculation about which of the two cells it is in.

Picross 3D is amazing. Should run without any problems on emulator.

I'll second Kaser's "Sherlock"... Had a lot of fun with that back when I had a windows box.

And YEAH, his art-style is funky indeed!

I first played Sherlock as a MS-DOS program in 1992 or so.

Of his many variations on the theme, I like "Mrs. Hudson": http://www.kaser.com/mh.html

Thanks, "Mrs. Hudson" is interesting. Still think I like the original Sherlock the best...

The puzzles in the Sherlock series have a wide range in complexity. I've tried all of them I think and I ended up gravitating to Mrs Hudson the most but I can see why other people would have other favorites. I like several of the non-Sherlock logic games as well -- someone mentioned Willa's Walk earlier in the thread which is a good one.

There have been a few games showing up on Steam with similar deduction gameplay with more contemporary design styles. (There have actually been a lot of interface improvements to the Sherlock games over the years, but style-wise they basically look the same as they did when they first came to Windows in 1996 or whenever!) HexCells was a decent series (there were three games), though to a EKS/Sherlock veteran, the first game was ridiculously easy. The second and third had some good puzzles in them, but they were all handcrafted rather than procedurally generated. I couldn't figure out why there weren't random puzzles, and then the third game (HexCells Infinite) did have random generation, and it turned out that the answer was: because the random puzzles were garbage. Still, the handcrafted puzzles in the second and third games were nice for a bit, but compared with a game like Sherlock that you can continue playing random puzzles for practically ever, it seems like a bit of a short stick. There were a couple others I found on Steam that were similar, but I mostly get my logical deduction habits on with Mrs Hudson still.

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