Logic Puzzles

February 17, 2010 2:37 PM

Since 1980, Nikoli^{^} has been in the business of creating many different variations of logic puzzles (such as the very popular Sudoku and Kakuro). Unfortunately, as they're stationed in Tokyo, their magazine is unavailable to most Americans.

Luckily, over the decades they've inspired quite a few people to make their own puzzles and variants, including:

• The Art of Puzzles, by Thomas Snyder (updated weekly, plus bonuses)
• A Cleverly-Titled Logic Puzzle Blog, by Grant Fikes (updated several times a week)
• Melon's Puzzles, by Palmer Mebane (updated daily)
• Detuned Radio, by Tom Collyer (updated weekly)

posted by flatluigi (12 comments total)

Simon Tatham's puzzle collection updated just a few weeks ago to include a kenken implementation and some very novel puzzles that I'd never seen prior (magnets, signposts, singles) that get mention in those four blogs.
posted by boo_radley at 3:20 PM on February 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Simon Tatham's puzzle collection is pretty damn cool, but it makes you really appreciate a good hand-made puzzle.
posted by aspo at 4:29 PM on February 17, 2010

Yeah, I love the puzzle collection but human-crafted ones are better by far.
posted by flatluigi at 4:36 PM on February 17, 2010

Entirely. The human-crafted (bespoke?) puzzles are cunning little gems, ST's puzzles are designed to crush the human soul be quite difficult. The iterations on crossword-puzzle structures are really fascinating, like with heyawake.
posted by boo_radley at 4:49 PM on February 17, 2010

Don't hate on Simon Tatham's, of course they aren't as good as hand-made, but they still have some very nice puzzles in there all the same. The puzzles they call Slant and Loopy are quite excellent.
posted by JHarris at 5:15 PM on February 17, 2010

Those are both Nikoli-created puzzle types, JHarris. :)

Loopy is Slitherlink. Here's Melon's and mathgrant's puzzles of that type; it's also one of my favorites.

Slant is Gokigen Naname, but I haven't seen any handmade versions of it.
posted by flatluigi at 5:31 PM on February 17, 2010

you guys might like strimko. it's definitely wasted many of my hours...
posted by sexyrobot at 5:44 PM on February 17, 2010

I'm a huge fan of Nurikabe, myself.
posted by rifflesby at 6:44 PM on February 17, 2010

Good list, good links. Thank you.
posted by painquale at 8:14 PM on February 17, 2010

I've been a nikoli.com subscriber for several years now, and it's been well worth it for me, especially as a timewaster when terribly bored.
posted by yeoz at 9:38 PM on February 17, 2010

Nice collection of links. A favorite puzzle site of mine is PuzzlePicnic which hosts user-submitted puzzles of quite a few different genres. It also has a Java applet that allows you to play the puzzles on your computer, rather than printing them out. It usually has one new puzzle every day.
posted by Tau Wedel at 6:56 AM on February 18, 2010

Oh, christ. Melon just posted the 200th puzzle released on his blog, and it's a doozy.


Link.
posted by flatluigi at 9:18 AM on February 21, 2010