Tag: PUZZLES

2010 has come to a close, and that means it's time for us to kill what little remains of your final Friday productivity with a look back at some of our best Time Wasters. Grab your mouse and keep your eyes peeled for the boss, it's time to fire up some casual gaming goodness in your Web browser! Each screenshot is linked directly to the game pictured -- so when you see something which catches ...

When I wrote about Word Domination, several Download Squad readers commented and proposed WHATSTHISW?RD as a possible alternative. It's as plain as can be: you write an English word with question marks in place of the letters you don't know, and it comes up with a number of alternatives. It does not support multi-letter wildcards (like d*squad); it only supports single characters. That makes ...

If ever there was a time waster for which the concept of a sequel seems ironic, it would be This is the Only Level. This is the Only Level's whole raison d'etre (sorry, I'm watching the winter games closing ceremony as I type this) is to play with the concept of what a level is. The game features one "level", if you define a level as how it is laid out on the screen, but you can complete many ...

Minim is a puzzle game where your goal is to deconstruct molecules until they disappear. This is done by sequentially clicking any two nodes of the same number that are linked by a single strand. The tutorial levels are deceptively simple, showing the mechanics of the games, but the puzzles become very difficult very fast. Luckily, the game is rendered in 3D, and allows you to freely rotate the ...

Okay, time to really geek out. Declarative languages are really the way to go if you're trying to teach a computer how to solve a puzzle, and though Prolog is the king of the declarative playground, it's equally geeky to do it in SQL, and that's what Samuel Aina did. His article Solving Sudoku with SQL describes what his title suggests: finding the unique solution to a Sudoku puzzle using T-SQL in ...

If you really, really want to kill some time today (and possibly the rest of your week), don't miss Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, a bundle of 24 open source, cross-platform puzzle games. Many of them will look familiar, like Solo (Sudoku), Mines (Minesweeper), and Guess (Mastermind), others perhaps not, but if you like puzzles you're guaranteed to find something addicing in ...