machai-umno

Tile'm all by Dimitry Bogaevsky is an incredibly hard puzzle game for iPhone and iPad. At first, it looks like just another sliding tile puzzle, but there is a clever variation, which I had never seen before: when two neighboring tiles are the same color, they merge, and from then on they can only move as a single piece. The goal is to merge all pieces of the same color. So in the puzzle above, if you move the green tile left you get into this position, which is already a lost position: continuing from here, you could for example merge the two yellow tiles and the two red tiles, but only leaving the green tiles split into two groups. The game contains 119 levels. The first three are 3x3, all the others are 4x4. Puzzle #4 is pretty difficult already. These puzzle feel claustrophobic, because every time two pieces are joined your movement options are reduced. Reaching the solution requires careful planning from the very first move, otherwise you'll inevitably end up blocked. Th

I'm usually suspicious of puzzle games that have "easy to learn and difficult to master" in their description, but Subaku by Eric Koziol is good despite that. I'm also totally bored by sudoku , but thankfully, despite the misleading icon and the suspiciously similar name, this is a completely different puzzle . If you are suspicious too, there's also a free version called subaku mini , which contains just the first 10 puzzles. The game is played on a 3x3 grid, containing some numbered tiles. when you tap a tile, its value is decreased by one, and its orthogonal neighbors are increased by one. So tapping the 4 above gives this: when a row, column, or diagonal contains three identical numbers, they are all removed. The goal is to clear the board. So tapping the 3 above would give this, and solve the puzzle: There are 100 puzzles included; the list is well presented with colorful thumbnails, and a target number of moves needed to solve the puzzle. Note that the targ

I apologize for not properly attributing the photos, I nabbed them as I found them ;) but I wanted to show some painted figs and some neat ideas.  

Stanley Lam has published several puzzle games for iPhone and iPad. They all seem to share a user interface style which I don't really like, though the underlying logic puzzles can be interesting. Linesweeper might be the best of the bunch so far. It is similar to the popular Slitherlink , but different enough to be noteworthy. The puzzle was actually invented a few years ago by +Jak Marshall , as mentioned on his blog . I like closed loop puzzles, my favorite being Monorail , so it should be no surprise that I like Linesweeper too. The play area is a grid containing some numbers. The grid is always square in this implementation of the puzzle, though it doesn't have to be. The goal is to draw a closed loop on the board. The loop cannot pass through cells containing a number. The numbers indicate how many of the 8 neighbouring cells must be crossed by the loop. So the solution to the above puzzle would be: Note that I had put a X between the 4 and 2, to remind that the loop c