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puzzles posts

Filed under: Fun, Games, Kids, Time-Wasters, Web

Minim - Time Waster

MinimMinim 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 molecule you are working on so that you can determine your best move.

Interestingly, Minim is the first free online Flash game that I've seen advertise that it has a companion iPhone version. This seems like a brilliant move - get people hooked on the free online version, then sell them a version they can take with them.

Minim is very pretty and quite challenging, two things that any good puzzle game must have. It's exceedingly satisfying to finish of a particularly complex molecule, and that is what will likely have you coming back again and again to play more Minim.

Filed under: Developer, Fun

Solving Sudoku with SQL

Solving Sudoku in SQLOkay, 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 SQL Server 2000. While the code isn't short (compare to, e.g., Chris Neukirchen's Prolog version), it's very clear and well-commented and really shows off the power of declarative programming.

[Via Digg]

Filed under: Fun, Games, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Palm, Open Source, Time-Wasters

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzles - Today's Time Waster

BridgesIf 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 the collection. I spent more time this weekend than I'd like to admit playing Bridges, Loopy (a.k.a. Slither Link) and Slant. Each of the games has multiple difficulty levels, save and load functions, multi-level undo and redo, and a few more features, and each one is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Palm OS. As if that weren't impressive enough, every puzzle is a download of less than 100kb.

[Via Anarchaia]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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