0h n0, another time waster

March 9, 2015 12:43 PM

0h n0 is a game of logical deduction where each dot in a grid can only exist in the same row or column as a certain number of like-colored dots. The game will give you specific pieces of information about how many like-colored dots a single dot can "see", and you must deduce the remaining grid of dots. It's from the same people who brought us the zen-like logic game 0h h1 (previously).

Tap a dot to change it to blue, tap again to change to red, tap again to change to unassigned. Clicking on a dot with a number with show you which dots the puzzle started with, and are unchangeable. The eye button will provide a hint if you are stuck. The X button will close out of the current puzzle and bring you back to the main menu.

A few UI improvements over 0hh1: there's now an undo button that also states what change was undone, and there's a timer mode where you can challenge yourself based on time to complete, .

posted by codacorolla (34 comments total)

Wait, do I have to watch the tutorial video every time I go to the site, or is there a way to skip it?
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:47 PM on March 9, 2015

The game keeps cookies, and should only show you the tutorial once.
posted by codacorolla at 12:48 PM on March 9, 2015

Oh, no, I see. It showed me the little intro animation a second time and I was worried it was the whole thing repeating, but then I got a menu. All good.
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:49 PM on March 9, 2015

...holy shit it is SO HARD to convince my brain that this is not Minesweeper.
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:56 PM on March 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

This is fun! Not too horribly hard once you get into it, either.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:11 PM on March 9, 2015

Oh man, I got so addicted to 0h h1 that i had to delete the bookmark and forget its very existence. I can't see this game ending much better for me.
posted by hopeless romantique at 1:15 PM on March 9, 2015

This is my new favourite commute game. (0h h1 has the timer mode now too)
posted by corvine at 1:16 PM on March 9, 2015

I've had 0h n0 on my phone for awhile. It's a fun, quick mental challenge. I've not moved past the 5x5 grid yet. Maybe soon...
posted by jazon at 1:16 PM on March 9, 2015

I've been alternating between poking at 0h n0 and 0h h1 on my phone for the past couple weeks. For some reason I find 0h h1 way more challenging; I can rip through the 8x8 grid in 0h n0 with no problem, but I frequently get stuck on the 8x8 and the 10x10 of 0h h1. The "no two rows can be identical" and "no two columns can be identical" rules always seem to trip me up.
posted by jordemort at 1:23 PM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ok how do you kids say "Ojoo?" Is it "ō-ho͞o?"
posted by Faux Real at 1:31 PM on March 9, 2015

I find this to be harder than oh hi. I can play that one almost on autopilot.
posted by ocherdraco at 1:34 PM on March 9, 2015

0h h1 is basically how I keep myself distracted on the subway. 0h n0 is nice but doesn't get me the same way.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:35 PM on March 9, 2015

Well, it took me a few goes to get an 8x8 done, but now I'm happy.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:56 PM on March 9, 2015

Oof. Whatever the name is for this kind of logic, it's a thing that my brain does NOT like.
posted by desuetude at 2:04 PM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been binge playing 0hn0 for two weeks now. I love these games. If anyone knows more of those kinds of time wasters please tell me!
posted by Omnomnom at 2:41 PM on March 9, 2015

Man, I can just click straight through an 0h h1 most of the time, but there's something I'm just not getting about this one.
posted by cmoj at 3:13 PM on March 9, 2015

0h h1 got easy enough that for a while I was playing only one color at a time on 10x10 - I'd pick either red or blue and only click those ties in, forcing myself to either remember or constantly re-infer the placements of the other color. At the end, I'd click all of the remaining blank spots to the other color. It's tough but somewhat satisfying.

This is going to take a while to sink into my brain the same way.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:27 PM on March 9, 2015

This seems very similar to the game Range from Simon Tatham's excellent collection of puzzle games.

Other exceptional ones from the collection:

Galaxies
Loopy
Net
Pattern
Pearl
Slant

Also available on Android.
posted by jamincan at 3:38 PM on March 9, 2015 [5 favorites]

Ooh, I really like this.

Also, I'm on my phone, and this metafilter page and even my keyboard seem oddly square after staring at those dots for half an hour. Anyone else getting that effect?
posted by mantecol at 8:14 PM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

If a cell is currently empty and walled off entirely by red, how do you know what colour it is?
posted by edd at 12:37 AM on March 10, 2015

A hint told me in that case it needs to be red - a blue can always see at least one other blue. Wasn't mentioned in the tutorial though.
posted by wilberforce at 1:06 AM on March 10, 2015

mantecol, yes, definitely, I found fonts looking much squarer than I thought they were after playing
posted by Ned G at 10:17 AM on March 10, 2015

A hint told me in that case it needs to be red - a blue can always see at least one other blue. Wasn't mentioned in the tutorial though.

Yeah, it took a hint to tell me that a row or a column can't repeat in 0h h1, too.
posted by kafziel at 1:09 PM on March 10, 2015

Ugh, I wish I could save specific states of the board, so I can try out a hypothesis and revert back to that state if the hypothesis is wrong.
posted by tickingclock at 1:51 PM on March 10, 2015

I have yet to encounter a board in either game that requires guessing or testing. Everything can be derived 100% from the rules. Which makes me wonder whether these aren't randomly generated, and instead are exhaustively put together.
posted by kafziel at 5:11 PM on March 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

In theory it could still be randomly generated if you can make a set of rules about what info the player needs to deduce the board.
posted by RobotHero at 5:21 PM on March 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't follow everything but looking at the code on the Github, it appears to generate them.
posted by RobotHero at 5:51 PM on March 10, 2015

I just got one that had a non unique solution, right at the end, when everything else was filled in I had a pattern like this:


O O X O 2 ? X
? O 6 O ? X X
.....O
.....O
.....O
posted by Ned G at 6:14 AM on March 18, 2015

where O is blue, X is red and the numbers are the number of blues in sight
posted by Ned G at 6:15 AM on March 18, 2015

Though we have to take your word for it there wasn't anything in the column below those two ?? that would have resolved the ambiguity.
posted by RobotHero at 10:17 AM on March 18, 2015

Is there a name for this class of games? This, as well as 0h h1 and Sudoku I would all put into the same family. You're given a starting board, the criteria that needs to be met, and need to logically deduce what all the blank fields contain.
posted by RobotHero at 10:24 AM on March 18, 2015

Puzzles!
posted by ocherdraco at 6:40 AM on March 19, 2015

I think of them as "constraint propagation games," but I don't think that's a real term.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:06 AM on March 19, 2015

My own genre would be "logical deduction puzzles", although a brief search through Google and Wikipedia says that's not something anyone except for me thinks.
posted by codacorolla at 12:19 PM on March 19, 2015