Readers may also enjoy Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, available for mobile as well: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
(My favorite currently is Dominosa. Playing the Hard mode is teaching me new patterns.)
(I'm stuck on Guess aka Mastermind right now, and damn good at it if I say so myself! Also Solo aka Sudoku on 6 sub-blocks, with X+Jigsaw+Killer & No symmetry+Unreasonable difficulty.)
I had intended to add more solitaire games but moved on to other projects. At the time it was an excuse for me to learn Javascript.
My favorite is pearl.
So you need to:
1) Build Halibut from source:
git clone https://git.tartarus.org/simon/halibut.git
cd halibut
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j
# binary lands at: halibut/build/halibut
cd /path/to/puzzles
cmake -B build-osx -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DHALIBUT=/full/path/to/halibut/build/halibut
cmake --build build-osx -j
cd build-osx && cpackCurious if you could let me know what code or images provide the backgrounds on your Kakuro, is it a CSS diagonal line, or a tile? What comes up if you run a quick:
find . -name diag.png -type f
.kakuro-clue { background-image: linear-gradient(to top right, transparent calc(50% - 0.5px), rgb(148 163 184) calc(50% - 0.5px), rgb(148 163 184) calc(50% + 0.5px), transparent calc(50% + 0.5px)); }
The site uses Tailwind CSS for the styling generally.
EDIT: just played a hard game, and genuinely made a mistake. Having it tell me immediately definitely was cheating as there was then only one other answer that square could have been.
After 3 attempts (all moves were mistakes! maybe I'm too stupid?) asked for my email.
Is emails collection the end-goal of this (vibe-coded, I suppose) page?
I'm a software engineer for my job and just code apps for a fun hobby in my spare time. Pretty much, most every software engineer uses agentic AI coding tools these days. I built this the same way I build software for my job. So it's not some slop codebase with API keys sitting in the HTML :)
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.
I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.
- Off-white or sepia toned backgrounds, similar subdued color palette for icons, grey ALL CAPS subheadings
- Serifed headings
- Various "Item: Quantity" lists (Puzzle types: 10, Puzzles solved: 1,951, etc.)
- Middle dot character for separator
One common tell it is lacking is the placement of colored dots or circles in the corners of panels or other UI elements, sometimes animated/pulsing.
To be clear it's not bad, it's a clean and friendly style. It just has that certain look, like a visual "it's not X it's Y".
It can definitely be prompted pretty successfully though, a bird spotting app was up her on HN recently with some really nice looking woodblock prints that were AI generated (I always feel disappointed/tricked when art turns out to be made by AI, I'm not sure why, it seems to pull the joy out of it for me)
going there on an ios device will give you a link to the app store, both the site and app are free to use.
It has several puzzle games already and we're trying to release around one new one per month. Any feedback is welcome.
When I was a kid, learning programming, I toyed with writing my own logic-puzzle solver program, but the challenge of turning words on their side defeated me at the time. Now it's just one line of CSS. :-)
Would you be interested in adding logic puzzles / logic grid puzzles? They're not that hard to create automatically; spend long enough on https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/ and you'll definitely notice that those puzzles are being auto-generated by an algorithm.
https://roulette.free/ https://blackjack.free/ https://baccarat.free/
little less heady than your site! but i still enjoy to play the games for free lol
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
I'm the same as you, not much of a designer, I was kind of elated when I got some good, themed, opinionated designs for some of my sites that felt like it was coming out of a collaborative brainstorming session, and matched the vibe I wanted. And then let down when I worked out there's only a limited number of things I can get the LLM to express, and it's gonna be similar for others.
So I am in a position to notice a design choice that I made appear in a somewhat substantially vibe-coded collection.
Though not a globally unique or revolutionary design element, the diagonal pinstripe background in this site’s Kakuro looks surprisingly similar to my own.
There are still a couple of bugs to iron out, but people seem to like the original Gravity Words game.
- having to switch between "star" and "exclude" modes is annoying on desktop, and most sites allow right click for placing "exclude" marks. it was a surprise that right click not only popped up the context menu but also placed a star (in a wrong spot, of course).
- counting mistakes doesn't make sense for a binary determination puzzle like star battle imo (or most logic puzzles for that matter). solving on paper doesn't count mistakes so what does a digital solving interface gain by doing so?
as someone who does a lot of logic puzzles (and thus would be in the market for buying a puzzle set) these usability obstacles make the inclusion of star battle feel like an afterthought.
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
https://imgur.com/a/Dfxf9CJ (before picking 2 / 6 / 7.)
Its solver is interesting in showing the individual steps.
For the same puzzle, https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx?bd=06039000804900150...
My daughter and I play it most nights, and she has been developing her deductive reasoning quickly enough that she occasionally sees the next move first now.
In the star battle (at least the medium I played) the solutions are non-unique and there you sometimes make random mistakes, which is a bit annoying. Unless I'm missing something because it's already late, but I'm quite sure.
I remember the blocker to a Sudoku app I was making in secondary school was just getting good puzzles. They're hard to make, particularly if you're signing up to make a new one every day. I guess you could create them with AI now, but you'd run significant risk of them being uncalibrated for difficulty or just outright invalid.
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
Only after you create an account? Oh my lord
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
Testing AI model's ability to solve puzzles like these. https://ppbench.com/
Can play the puzzles and compare your timing and accuracy to many AI models on the leaderboards
No monetization of any kind other than a slightly hidden donate button.
And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?
I hear ya. Maybe multiples of 5 would've been better. Mainly, I was trying to get a good mobile experience with as big of a board as I could. Perhaps not the best call.
Plan to keep it forever free :)
Now waiting already for a week for Apple greenlighting my iOS update for the level builder...
// Fire view events (e.g. unlock_prompt_viewed) for any monetization prompt
// present in the freshly loaded page. data-analytics-view-events is a JSON
// array so one rendered prompt can report several events at once.
I prefer Bicross RPG.
along those lines, you know what might be interesting is to have OSS models, including old ones, and select the model to play against (a bit like stockfish has different algos you can play chess against). This substitutes for levels of difficulty (assuming the old/small OSS models are worse, though when it comes to scrabble they might be just as good as any human in which case you would have to introduce some noise to degrade their performance
since a human would know these are bad nonograms, i have to assume this is all llm-generated.
i see you have already addressed similar comments, just sharing my two cents since i usually love puzzles.
And here we are again. A nice idea, ai generated, for grabbing email addresses... Not even trying to give it a human touch. Is this the new spam? Hundreds of sites and web apps forcing you to sign up with a temp email address for no good reason?
You can make your substantive points without any of that, and if you had followed the HN guidelines in general, you would have:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Maybe try changing how you talk about the price a bit on the page. No one's going to be put off by knowing there's a lot of free content, and then later on you have a one-off fee to continue playing. But they will be put off if they don't understand how any of the pricing works, and if they feel like there's a catch you're not telling them about.
I get what you're trying to do, you want to offer something on the cheap and that's great. Just be open about when the payment is needed, and what that payment is. You'll likely get more sign ups from being open about it up front.