Looks nice but feels severely underbaked. Did a medium soduku puzzle. Made a mistake, so I tried erasing it to get rid of the noise. 0? no. backspace? also no apparently. then I just mashed other number keys to see if the square was responive at all and I failed the puzzle. Why does sodoku need a fail counter in the first place?
Strong +1 to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. One note: the main iOS app is a little wonky in places. I've been using Kyle Swarmer's "Puzzles Reloaded" app, which is a little nicer in places.
I install Simon's collection on every device of mine, as well as PySol.
(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 have been playing nonograms for a year now, there was never insta death, controls are a little off, title is hidden until its solved to avoid spoilers This is obviously programmed by someone who doesn't play nonograms. Safe to assume it was vibe-coded
I see this kind of thing as the future of SaaS. Passionate developers out competing incumbents on both quality and price. One off purchases from "1000 true fans" is enough to make the effort worthwhile. It's a win-win for indie devs and their customers.
I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.
I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.
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.
The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.
I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.
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.
I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.
For images, there are some clear styles AI leans heavily on if not actively steered away[0].
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)
My family and I went down a very similar path, we were tired of all the ads and dark patterns when we just wanted to play simple puzzle games. We made a pretty similar site/app
Neat! I've recently built a Sudoku for my friends in Flutter as we were tired of ads showing up prior to games in most versions you can find on the Playstore. I gotta check out the the other games on this website too.
I also hate ads in games, ... and as another serious restriction I only play on thumb slide games (think 2048) that just make me think enough (i want to relax) so I and Fable 5 developed https://squishy.franzai.com/ (Design is Opus 4.8, iOS Frame also Opus 4.8 - as Fable was gone by then).
Now waiting already for a week for Apple greenlighting my iOS update for the level builder...
Based on the title, I was expecting the things I grew up calling logic puzzles, which some people call "logic grid" puzzles, e.g. https://www.allstarpuzzles.com/logic/00019.html (note: expired HTTPS certificate, but site doesn't ask for any login or anything, it just displays the puzzles) or https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/
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.
Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.
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.
Yep, I feel ya. Good feedback. This is like version 3 of the home page. The first two looked very typical AI. I thought maybe a newspaper vibe might be cool as a throwback to the puzzles you'd do in the paper. But it does have some of those cookie cutter AI tells. I'm a software engineer by trade and not much of a designer honestly. This probably won't be the final form of the home page, I'd imagine.
I mean, it does look cool. Felt unique when I had landed on it. But then I saw another site that looked identical to mine and I moved on.
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.
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.
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.
Love it! My only feedback is the many-squared puzzles are hard to play on a phone without a stylus (accidental misclicks are challenging with the small box size)
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?
Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.
if you like sudoku, you owe it to yourself to check out the "cracking the cryptic" youtube channel and get introduced to the delightful world of variant sudoku.
I'll plug a little page that I (well, Claude) put together for bite-sized 4x4 Sudoku puzzles mixing popular variant constraints:
https://yakymp.github.io/sudoku4x4/
the star battle interface diverges from penpa, puzpre, and puzzleteam in a number of basic ways that actively make the solving experience worse imo:
- 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.
It doesn't cost me much to run. About $9/month for the VPS + domain and I run other apps on the same VPS. Just my little hobby server. It does have monetization though, but I give the first 25 puzzles of each type + difficulty for free and then you pay a few bucks to unlock the rest. Maybe I'm being too generous, but it's not a big deal really.
Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.
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)
Not good? I'm not opposed to that. I just needed a place to put it and in the account settings seemed natural. Then there's no cookies or anything. The setting is just stored in the database.
Nice puzzles, thanks letting me have a couple of fun minutes with those.
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.
By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.
Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.
Wanted to add my puzzle engine built for TUI. I have 15 puzzles, zine printing, and daily/weekly seeded challenges. Love seeing more puzzles without corporate shilling being the bitter aftertaste.
Haha, yeah, the early puzzles are pretty simple, but they do start to get more variety as you progress through them.
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.
Nice! real cool! This site does have monetization, but I give the first 25 puzzles free for each difficulty level. So a good amount of free content and I'm still trying to add more games.
haha! no thanks :) I play it myself because it doesn't have ads and cause it has multiple puzzles that I like. It is monetized though. You get the first 25 puzzles for free in every puzzle type + difficulty, then you can pay a few bucks to unlock all of the rest. But this site has made $0 so far. It may never make anything, but at least I'll still have a place to play the puzzles :)
Love the look of the site. I have also grown tired of ads showing up everywhere nowadays. I'd much rather spend a bit of money than be forced to watch through another ad.
I hate that it immediately flags your errors. First, because it doesn't forgive the casual finger slipping or forgetting if you are in pen or pencil mode. And then because it partially gives away the solution.
After starting a nonogram level, it seems you can't go back to it because you're just prompted to sign up or log in. As mentioned already they're also shitty puzzles.
// 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.
It's referring to the fact that after you complete 25 puzzles of a specific difficulty, it'll prompt you to unlock all the puzzles for a couple bucks. Helps offset server costs to run the site. So the comment in the code is addressing if a user has viewed that prompt or not. So not a "prompt" in the LLM sense.
Good feedback. I've struggled with it honestly. Trying to make a good user experience, but it's tricky with 10 puzzles types and more coming. Is it the amount of puzzles that feels that way?
No, it is mostly the topbar and the blank space for some reason, maybe make the games more centric to the homepage? I am not very good at describing things
went to today's puzzle, was assigned an easy symmetrical nonogram. even though that was a disappointing start i was open to doing more, so i opened a hard one and was faced with a nonogram symmetrical on more axes than the easy one.
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.
The AI generated nonograms are actually better. I made the diamond myself sadly. They do get harder as you progress through them. I'm not good at pixel art, so I started with simple things like diamond and heart, but you're not the first to mention it, so I should've probably left those out.
Good feedback! I've built a wordle clone in the past (back when I had to write it all by hand!). Right now, I'm focused on logic puzzles and there are dozens more I'd like to add, but word puzzles may be coming at some point in the future. I had thought of them, but there's just so many different puzzles I want to put on there!
awesome. def need levels of difficulty for word puzzles against the AI; would be impossible to win otherwise :)
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
Not behind Tor here, but I just got a "406 Not Acceptable" with "Your browser is not supported". I'm running Firefox here, but on an older machine with an ESR v115 release. Does your site use particular functionality not supported in older Firefox?
Alrighty, I figured it out. You should be able to use it now. It's because I'm using Tailwind CSS version 4 and some of the things won't look perfectly in that browser version, but the site should be functional now for ya!
> Create a free account to keep playing. Sign up or log in to create an account, save your progress, and continue this difficulty.
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?
Show HNs are places to discuss people's work respectfully and curiously, so attacks like this are particularly harmful here. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
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."
No it's not a lie. It doesn't have ads or a subscription. You do need to login to continue playing more of the same type + difficulty for puzzles. There is an eventual paywall after you reach 25 puzzles + difficulty (so like after you've done 25 easy sudoku puzzles and you want to do more easy ones) for a couple bucks to help offset server costs. But it's a one-time thing. No monthly subscription at all. In all transparency, I've made $0 so far. No one has even reached the 25 free puzzle limit for any of the puzzles on there.
I think the messaging is just a bit confusing. You've said this had no ads and no subscription, and then people see you want them to create an account. If there's no money being paid, and no ads then the next conclusion is either you'll sell data or rug-pull later on. Clearly that isn't actually your intention.
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.
I don't have any need for your email address. You could put "foo@bar.com" in there if you want. The account is for tracking progress and eventually there is a paywall. I give 25 puzzles for free for every puzzle type + every difficulty, but after that, you pay a couple bucks to unlock the rest of the puzzles. Helps pay the server fees. Although I've made $0 so far and that's fine really. This is mostly just a fun little site for people to use.
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