Logic puzzles, playable in your browser

Every puzzle on this page comes from one place: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, a set of about forty logic puzzles that its author has been writing and maintaining since 2004, and that he releases under the MIT licence. That licence is the reason they can be hosted here whole: no trial version, no daily limit, no account. What you play is the collection's own code compiled to WebAssembly, running in your browser tab.

The other thing that sets them apart is that nobody wrote the grids. Each one is generated when you press New game, and for the grid-logic puzzles the generator checks that the result has exactly one solution and can be solved by deduction alone. You will never meet a sudoku here that needs a guess to finish, and you will never run out of them.

Where to start

Sudoku (Solo) — The standard 9×9 at four difficulty levels, plus jigsaw, X and killer variants from the Type menu.
Nonogram (Pattern) — Shade the grid from the row and column clues until a picture appears. Large grids take a satisfying half hour.
Number loop puzzle (Loopy) — Draw one closed loop around numbered cells. Simple rules, and the best example of how deep a deduction puzzle can go.
Bridges puzzle (Bridges) — Connect the islands with bridges so every island has its number. Quick at small sizes, properly hard at large ones.
Network tile-rotation puzzle (Net) — Rotate the tiles until every pipe is connected to the centre. The easiest one here to pick up without reading anything.

Which one to try first

If you already know one of these, start with it: Sudoku (called Solo in the collection) also does jigsaw, X and killer variants from its Type menu, and the nonogram (Pattern) is the picture-from-numbers puzzle many people know from magazines. If you know neither, Net and Flood have rules you can learn by clicking for thirty seconds. The loop and region puzzles, such as Loopy, Galaxies, Slant and Range, reward slower, deliberate play and are where the collection is at its best.

How the controls work

All of the puzzles share one set of conventions. Left-click to place or select, right-click for the secondary action (usually marking a square as definitely empty, or adding a pencil mark), and the keyboard arrows with Enter and Space work almost everywhere for people who prefer not to use a mouse. Undo and Redo are unlimited, Restart goes back to the start of the current grid, and Solve shows the answer if you want to check your reasoning. The Type menu sets the size and difficulty, and the Game menu can save a position to a file so you can finish it later.

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Frequently asked questions

Are these the same puzzles as in newspapers?

Several are the same puzzle types, such as sudoku, nonograms and futoshiki, under the names their publishers use. The grids themselves are generated by the collection's own code rather than taken from any publication.

Can I play them offline?

Not from this site, which needs the network to load each puzzle. Simon Tatham also publishes the collection as free downloads for Windows and Unix-like systems, and others have ported it to further platforms.