Do you like mind-bending puzzle time wasters? If so, I think you're going to like Magneboy. The game play is simple, but the game quickly becomes a thinker. You play the part of Magneboy, and you have the ability to move yourself over gaps of space to steel tiles using your magnetic ability. Some of the other tiles on the board are moveable using your magnetic powers, and still others have effects that change the direction or effect of your magnetism.

The game has a fun, whimsical look and feel, which makes me feel bad for not feeling as calm as the game appears to deserve. But seriously - sometimes the tiles simply won't move the way I want them to. It's frustrating. I mean fun, yes - fun. Frustratingly fun. That's a thing, isn't it? Now it is.

Magneboy: Frustratingly fun.

Little Wheel is a wonderfully-illustrated puzzle game starring a robot in a city where the power is out and everything is broken and needs repairing. The levels are cast in shadow against a slick sunset background that suits the game's collection of machines perfectly. Little Wheel is also one of the only flash games I've played with a soundtrack that didn't drive me nuts after 30 seconds. Sure, the fun, jazzy music does get repetitive, but it's good enough to leave on for a little while. The sound effects are great, too.

A little while is probably all you'll need to beat Little Wheel. It's a pretty game, but the puzzles are a little easier than I'd like. Wanton pointing and clicking can get you through some levels, but it's worth playing each level just to see what the machines do. I wish it were longer and more complex, but Little Wheel looks and sounds better than most of the casual puzzle games out there.

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

Today is a historic day. Not only is it the 65th anniversary of D-Day (and my grandfather, a US Naval Captain was there), It is the 25th anniversary of the greatest puzzle game of all time: Tetris. In honor of Alexey Pajitnov's awesome creation, I've tracked down some awesome ways to play Tetris on your PC or Mac -- for free.

Tetris 1989 (www.tetrisfriends.com) -- Although Tetris might have debuted in June of 1984, most of us were first introduced to this addictive puzzler in 1989 on a green and yellow tinged screen. As the pack-in game with the original Game Boy, Tetris was catapulted to a whole new audience of fans. Although we had Tetris (and Dr. Mario) for our NES, it wasn't until I got a Game Boy for Christmas in 1991 (third grade, baby!) that I really, really became Tetris-obsessed. You can revisit that nostalgia on your web browser in this Flash-based port, provided by Tetrisfriends.com (the official website for the Tetris.com rights holders). The original game music is even included! Tetrisfriends.com has a lot of other variations too, but the best, by far is Tetris 1989.

Quinn (OS X) -- Official variations for Tetris have been available for the Mac throughout Tetris's history, but the best native OS X iteration is Quinn, a tetromino game made specifically for OS X. You can even download special piece styles and backgrounds to make Quinn look more or less retro. Also, don't forget about the neat (if ultimately kludgy) implementation of Tetris included with emacs bundled in OS X.

The Original Tetris (MS-DOS, all 32-bit versions of Windows, including Windows 7) -- Developed a few days after the initial Electronica 60 prototype of the game, the MS-DOS port of the original game still exists, thanks to Vadim Gerasimov, whole helped create the port. His page discussing the development process for Tetris is an interesting read.

Tetrislight (Tetris for Silverlight) -- This is a neat Tetris implmentation using Silverlight rather than Flash. It's fun and the keyboard controls correlate to the old Microsoft Entertainment Pack of yore.

Quadra (Linux) -- There are lots of various Tetris-like games available for various Linux builds (Netris is a fun one), but I like Quadra because of its network support. It was also recently updated. Check out the Google Code page too!

If you've ever played the classic game Pipes, then Colourshift will probably feel pretty familiar to you. In Colourshift you are presented with an invisible grid of squares that may contain various pieces. the idea is to pipe the correct colors from their color source (the colored squares) to their lights (the colored circles) of the same color.

Though the game is conceptually very simple, gameplay can get very complex very quickly. For example, there are times where you'll need to mix different colors into the same circuit to create new colors - for example, blue and red combining to make magenta to light a magenta light.

Making matters worse is that on later levels the concept of wrapping through the edges of the screen and dummy pieces (ones that don't need to be used at all) combine to make solving the puzzle even more confusing.

Colourshift is a nice take on a tried-and-true game concept that you can use to give your brain a little workout.

I absolutely love head-scratching puzzle games, and Minim fits the bill. Gameplay is simple: you match connected molecules by number, making them disappear until you clear the board. The levels themselves are not so simple. Once you make it past the basic learning-the-ropes intro levels, you'll find your rotating the board and resetting the puzzle, trying to find the one move that will unravel the whole thing.

As the game progresses, new twists appear in the game. There are blue connections that let you swap adjacent molecules, addition and subtraction molecules that change the numbers on the board, and other monkey wrenches that generally make the puzzle harder. Minim may require minimal skill to play, but it requires some creativity to beat.

Warm up your brain and your index finger, it's time to click some blocks!

DBlocks 2 is a fun little puzzler where you're tasked with removing colored blocks from the play area in a specified number of clicks..

Arrows on the block indicate which direction they're "aimed," though they only remove other blocks of the same color. In the screenshot, for example, clicking the far right orange block in the bottom row would remove it, the one adjacent, and the one on the far left side.

Though gray blocks can't be removed, gravity still applies: removing blocks from below will cause those above to slide down.

There are plenty of levels in DBlocks 2, so you should have no problem killing whatever Friday productivity you had left. If you're hungry for more, there are plenty of other great Time Wasters in the DLS archives.

Crossblocks is a simple puzzle game. How is it played? Would you believe by crossing out groups of blocks to remove them from the play area?

Each level presents a new configuration of blocks that you've got to fully remove, and a specified number that you must remove at once. The first twenty or so levels were fairly easy to zip through, but they give you a good feel for how the game works.

After that, you'll need to be a bit more awake than I was. Your lines don't have to cover full rows - they just need to be long enough to remove the required number of blocks. Many levels have more than one solution that works, which is always welcome in a Flash puzzle game.

Crossblocks is a non-stressful little thinker to help you unwind for a few minutes.

"Everything is circular, Happy. Feel the flow."

In loops of zen, your task is to restore harmony to an assortment of shapes by assembling them in such a way that "no open end is left over."

Click, click, click. Turn, turn, turn. Click, click, click. Try again.

It's a good thing the process is so simple, because I probably would have gotten hopelessly flustered with anything more complicated once I'd gotten through a few levels of this seemingly simple puzzler.

Soothing, ambient music plays gently in the background. It's clearly an attempt by the game's developer to keep you from launching your fancy new netbook out a window as you search for the right combination of twists and turns to complete each level.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go look for something in the snowbank. Totally unrelated.

Some time wasters seems sort of dumb when written out, but when you play them, you realize how fun they are. This one might be one of those. BoomBot is a game where you place bombs to try to blast your robot character to the goal door on each level.

While it sounds simple, and it starts out simple enough, soon enough the levels start to get pretty challenging. You'll have to interact with various materials and objects, such as rubber blocks, boxes, and even explosive things like oil barrels and boxes of TNT, each of which have their own unique properties.

When placing your bomb, you have full control over where it goes, as well as how strong the blast is. To control the blast strength, hold down your mouse button and the bomb will get bigger and smaller, corresponding to the size of the blast. The challenge comes when you're trying to time a blast for a specific moment, but need it to be a specific size blast. For me, at least, I could never seem to time things so that my blast size was correct at the moment I needed it. But that's the fun of it, right?

The best part about breaking your leg or your arm or your collar bone, aside from all the fringe benefits, is that you get to go to the hospital and eat all the Jello you want. JelloCar is a fun little game that takes that concept to the next level: by letting you DRIVE all the Jello you want.

Ok, so maybe that analogy doesn't work. This is still a fun little game though. Basically you are a 2D Jello Car in a 2D Jello World. Everything has Jello like physics and each level is more of a like a puzzle than a race track. Hit the space bar and the car grows by a 1000% -- very useful for cross large pot holes or pushing aside boulders. There are a lot of levels included and you can build your own using the included level editor.

This is, obviously, an independently produced game and the sound shows it. Just picture a 25 year old man standing behind your chair making "vroom!" sounds and you get the basic idea. Still, if this doesn't totally creep you out, the sounds are pretty amusing.

All and all a fun game and a fantastic example of 2D game physics. The game comes in Windows and XBOX 360 versions.

[via The Night School]