Comment by MITSardine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MITSardine | Hacker News Reader

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I've had this on my phone for years, it's a great collection of puzzles. I haven't tried them all (games on phones), but it's certainly the best I have. No ads, no useless gamification, but well polished and varied puzzles, and quite a bit of control over the difficulty.

My favourite has to be "Keen", it's a sudoku-like where a grid has to be filled with no repeated numbers on either columns or rows, and arbitrarily shaped cells must be filled to satisfy an arithmetic constraint like "sums to 7", "the product is 84" or "one divided by the other is 3" (if sized two).

Towers is nice too, similar concept (re repetition), but the constraints are now visibility ranges on the boundaries of the grid, as you put down towers of varying height. I find it more difficult.

Some of the games are more mechanical, where you can mindlessly iterate to a solution step by step. Like "Net" (rotate pipes to connect them all to the center). Towers takes some more guess work, and I find Keen is there in the middle.

Net can be done with reasoning rather than mindless iteration. You start by locking in end points surrounded by other end points except for one free space. if you have a straight line that can connect two end points then you lock it in the other orientation. If a line is locked next to a T pipe, the back of the t pipe goes against the line. If a corner piece is next to a locked pipe, you know that the side opposite the incoming pipe is empty, so it could be the back of a T or the side of a line piece, etc.

i only play Net (largest size or bigger, wrapping) using the locks; I disconnect the surrounding pipes from the center so nothing is lit up, and then start locking squares based on their surroundings. some of them I can't even solve. I can see the answer, but my head can't contain the logic necessary to lock them down

Yeah, that's what I meant. On the other hand, something like Towers has you trying different configurations because there's not always enough information to motivate the next step.

I haven't tried Towers, but I had thought that every game in his collection was such that guessing was never required. The logic/rules might not always be obvious, but supposedly they are there.

I think there's still a unique solution but, on the harder difficulties, you're given very little to work with. (in Towers)

I think some guessing is necessary if you select one of the custom difficulty settings

I like Solo (Sudoku), but that's hard to play on my phone sadly.

I end up doing hard modes of Flood and Signpost a lot, though.

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