Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site

by HaxleRose • 1 month ago

251 167 1 month ago

This is nice!

Readers may also enjoy Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, available for mobile as well: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

(My favorite currently is Dominosa. Playing the Hard mode is teaching me new patterns.)

penr0se• 1 month ago

Mine is currently Net, 7x7 grid with wrapping variant. I take about 5 minutes on average to solve a level, which is the sweet spot for me

pavel_lishin2• 1 month ago

Oh, this is kinda fun, I'm gonna play with it for a bit!

zellyn• 1 month ago

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.

tunesmith• 1 month ago

Wow, didn't know this existed until today. Thanks!

rahimnathwani• 1 month ago

The MacOS build on the page is quite old, and doesn't reflect recent fixes/enhancements. If you want to build it from source for MacOS the included instructions won't work because Simon's 'halibut' documentation tool will be missing.

So you need to:

1) Build Halibut from source:

   git clone https://git.tartarus.org/simon/halibut.git
   cd halibut
   cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
   cmake --build build -j
   # binary lands at: halibut/build/halibut

2) Build the puzzles app, pointing CMake at that halibut binary. Do this in a fresh build dir (don't reuse a stale top-level CMakeCache.txt that already recorded HALIBUT-NOTFOUND):

   cd /path/to/puzzles
   cmake -B build-osx -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
       -DHALIBUT=/full/path/to/halibut/build/halibut
   cmake --build build-osx -j

3) Now you have build-osx/Puzzles.app and can (optionally) build the dmg:

   cd build-osx && cpack

rustcleaner• 1 month ago

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.)

patrickdavey• 1 month ago

Yeah, this collection is _awesome_. I'm currently enjoying the Towers (just do it on 5x5 simple, and find it quite relaxing!).

navane• 1 month ago

This one is so good. Original puzzles, works fine on mobile. Very future proof.

My favorite is pearl.

Intermernet• 30 days ago

I feel like I shouldn't need to say this, but Simon is also the Author of the awesome PuTTY. Until fairly recently, a vital tool of anyone doing remote management from Windows.

JKCalhoun• 30 days ago

(Over a decade ago now?) I created https://kardland.com with a couple of solitaire games. No ads or other bullshit.

I had intended to add more solitaire games but moved on to other projects. At the time it was an excuse for me to learn Javascript.

HaxleRose48• 30 days ago

Nice! The first app I built and put is https://peopleneed.love Just a simple site to let random people encourage other random people. It was a good way for me to learn some of the Ruby on Rails Hotwire tools.

abhashanand1501• 1 month ago

How do you plan to keep it free from ads? I see it has accounts, if it was completely client side, it could have been forever free.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

GL26• 1 month ago

Please copy the LinkedIn Games !

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

Oh yeah? I'll have to check them out. Good tip!

lewistaariq• 1 month ago

I second this suggestion.

iooi• 1 month ago

Nice job! I made something similar, mostly for myself: https://www.vexling.com

Plan to keep it forever free :)

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

underyx• 1 month ago

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.

pred_• 1 month ago

I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.

And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.

giancarlostoro• 1 month ago

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.

benrutter2• 1 month ago

the front page is full of LLM smells

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.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

miguel-muniz• 1 month ago

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.

vova_hn2• 1 month ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

ChrisRR• 1 month ago

Well i like the theory but all of your nonograms are symmetrical or diamonds. Not exactly much of a puzzle

And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

inigyou2• 1 month ago

Are you blocking Tor?

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

Hmmm, if it is, I wasn't aware of it. Let me look into my rate-limiting settings that might block something like that.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

Checked on it and I'm not blocking Tor. Are you getting issues? Maybe it's not handling the boost in traffic from this post

SyneRyder• 1 month ago

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?

neogodless2• 1 month ago

I'm 99% sure this was an invalid Sudoku puzzle.

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?

https://imgur.com/a/aOnKbiT

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?

EdSchouten• 1 month ago

Yeah, that Sudoku puzzle has multiple valid solutions, whereas the page only seems to accept a single one.

rmunn2• 1 month ago

There's an extra constraint on that one: the two main diagonals must both have nine different digits. That's what makes it a single-solution puzzle.

doodpants• 1 month ago

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.

neogodless2• 1 month ago

All I've never done the diagonals before... oops.

https://imgur.com/a/Dfxf9CJ (before picking 2 / 6 / 7.)

insane_dreamer2• 1 month ago

Nice! A few word games would be cool: scrabble, boggle, etc.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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!

insane_dreamer2• 1 month ago

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

yunruse• 1 month ago

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)

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

Good feedback. I hadn't gotten to sharing puzzles yet and hadn't really thought of that. I'll have to look into it. Thanks!

SpyCoder773• 1 month ago

The homepage is a little overwhelming, other than that cool site

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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?

SpyCoder773• 1 month ago

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

SpyCoder773• 1 month ago

More clarification: The topbar, the newspaper asthetic

ori_b• 1 month ago

I took a quick look at the source:

      // 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.

What's a monetization prompt?

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

furyofantares2• 1 month ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

furyofantares2• 1 month ago

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.

lschueller2• 1 month ago

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?

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

Should've asked for a photo ID!

lschueller2• 1 month ago

Oh yes! This would fit in. "Please verify with Persona" will be the next level.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

Haha! That'll be required for your coding agents soon enough sadly.

IsTom• 1 month ago

So "no ads, no subscription" on its front page is a lie? I am shocked, so very shocked.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

dang• 1 month ago

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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WolfeReader2• 1 month ago

The "Hard" big diamond nonogram was not hard at all. Are you vibe-coding these?

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

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.

WolfeReader2• 1 month ago

Unfortunately, these days, "Show HN" is a code phrase for vibe-coded and untested projects. I was optimistic for this one because I love puzzles.

bluecoconut• 1 month ago

For those who like these types of puzzles, i made a benchmark called pencil puzzle bench

Testing AI model's ability to solve puzzles like these. https://ppbench.com/

Can play the puzzles and compare your timing and accuracy to many AI models on the leaderboards

trizoza• 1 month ago

Play in dark mode

Only after you create an account? Oh my lord

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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.

celsoazevedo2• 1 month ago

Why not respect the browser/system's theme? No need for settings or javascript:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...

inigyou2• 1 month ago

How do you think it remembers your account? With a cookie

butz2• 1 month ago

Not really sure if you can call Nonogram a puzzle, when you give the answer right in the title.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

fair point, maybe I should only show the title after the puzzle is solved. what do you think?

butz2• 28 days ago

Yes, that's what all classic Nintendo Picross games used to do. And there's a bit of mystery - you never know what you will uncover.

acquacow• 1 month ago

Now I just need an ad-free save the doggo from the bees site. =)

HlessClaudesman• 1 month ago

Why ask for an account / sign up at all?

cbxyp2• 1 month ago

I did the same with a few of my favorite casino games (and to save some money)

https://roulette.free/ https://blackjack.free/ https://baccarat.free/

little less heady than your site! but i still enjoy to play the games for free lol

FailMore• 1 month ago

Nice, mobile layouts could improve… couldn’t bet in roulette

cbxyp2• 29 days ago

Ah shoot, thank you for pointing that out! can I ask iOS or Android?

merelysounds• 1 month ago

If you want image nonograms (as opposed to randomized nonograms), you can try Nonoverse[1]; I made it for the same reasons.

[1] https://lab174.com/nonoverse

_doctor_love• 1 month ago

You know if this site gets popular and takes off, you could probably monetize it...with ads

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

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 :)

Azrael3000• 1 month ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

They should be unique solutions. The way I generate the puzzles requires them to have a unique solution. I've thought I found a couple that were not unique, but then both times, I was missing a cell I could eliminate. But let me know at ChestertonTechnologies@gmail.com with the puzzle number and difficulty if you find one and I'll look into it!

dirteater_• 1 month ago

Cool but why do I have to create an account to keep playing? I hit the back button to review the rules and now I can't even try the game out.

sebasv_• 1 month ago

Really cool! I went through the same frustration with multiplayer games so I built https://parlor.vqi.io

No monetization of any kind other than a slightly hidden donate button.

juhnu85• 1 month ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 1 month ago

For sure! I couldn't find an app with a good mobile UI without ads. I would've paid a few bucks for one, so I figured others might feel the same way.

FelineStateMach• 1 month ago

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.

https://github.com/FelineStateMachine/puzzletea

tonymet• 1 month ago

eventually hosting costs money, so ads will be needed

enahs-sf• 1 month ago

Love it. Inspiring me to upgrade my puzzle game site.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

awesome!!

circuitqed• 1 month ago

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

https://puzzleparlor.fun

going there on an ios device will give you a link to the app store, both the site and app are free to use.

It has several puzzle games already and we're trying to release around one new one per month. Any feedback is welcome.

zeroonetwothree• 1 month ago

Crossjam is a fun one!

el_io• 1 month ago

It won't even let me play sudoku if I don't sign-in.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

email me at ChestertonTechnologies@gmail.com if you find bugs like this and I'll try to fix them. You should be able to play one puzzle of every type + difficulty without signing in.

ewy1• 1 month ago

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.

largbae• 30 days ago

Also great and ad-free: https://cluesbysam.com/

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.

aji• 30 days ago

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.

f311a• 30 days ago

Exactly, I also prefer when neighboring cells are automatically marked when you place a star

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

That's a good idea. I'll look into adding that feature!

rmunn2• 30 days ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

Good feedback. I do plan on continuing to add other kinds of logic puzzles to the site as time permits. I'll check out those sites!

TurdF3rguson• 30 days ago

You need to make the leaderboard be daily and for a single daily puzzle. Otherwise there's no reason to check it.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

Thanks for the feedback. The leaderboard definitely needs some love

cochleari_major• 30 days ago

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/

danpalmer• 30 days ago

Where are you sourcing all your puzzles?

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.

tgv• 30 days ago

I always thought people generated sudokus with heuristics, e.g. the less numbers remain, the harder it is.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

All the puzzles are generated by the app. Each puzzle type has its own generator. Some take a while to generate and I have to do them ahead of time, but Sudoku and X Sudoku generate on the fly

zx8080• 30 days ago

Create a free account to keep playing.

After 3 attempts (all moves were mistakes! maybe I'm too stupid?) asked for my email.

Is emails collection the end-goal of this (vibe-coded, I suppose) page?

blourvim• 30 days ago

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

HaxleRose48• 30 days ago

Thanks for the feedback. I've done nonograms with a three strikes and your out style, so I based it off of that. I just couldn't find any without having to watch ads often before and after playing a puzzle. Good criticism about hiding the title until after it's solved. Someone else mentioned that as well. It's on my list of things to change actually. Like I wrote to the person who you're replying to, it's not some slop web app. I'm a professional software engineer and I coded this the same way I code at work, with agentic AI using Ruby on Rails, following TDD, thin controllers & models, security best practices, ect.

HaxleRose48• 30 days ago

Nope, I don't care about your email. Just a way for you to track progress, contribute to leaderboards, get achievements, and be able to reset your password if you forget it. The end-goal was originally just for me to have an ad-free place for me to play my favorite puzzle games and I shared it with HN. I do ask for a couple bucks after a solver finishes 25 of every puzzle + difficulty just to help out with server costs. But I don't dream that I'll even break even on this.

I'm a software engineer for my job and just code apps for a fun hobby in my spare time. Pretty much, most every software engineer uses agentic AI coding tools these days. I built this the same way I build software for my job. So it's not some slop codebase with API keys sitting in the HTML :)

teo_zero2• 30 days ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

I hear ya and I am in the process of switching them to removing the error flagging and making them work by letting the solver click/tap a button when they've completed the puzzle. Then it will tell them if it's correct or not.

teo_zero2• 27 days ago

Or you could only flag the inconsistencies, for example if the same digit shows up twice in the same row.

smiles4miles• 30 days ago

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)

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

Yep, it's a tricky problem. I'm currently in the process of switching the way the puzzles work so that they don't have a mistake counter and instead allow the solver to tap a button when they're complete instead. That will make mistakes no big deal. Hope it helps! I'll also see what I can do about the size of the cells.

a_c2• 30 days ago

I like the WSJ/newspaper look of the site, nice!

notarobot123• 30 days ago

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.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

For sure! And I know this isn't going to make a bunch of money or anything, but it's made a few bucks to help cover server costs, so that's pretty cool!

franze• 30 days ago

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...

Sander_Marechal• 30 days ago

Perhaps add "Tectonic" as a puzzle type? It's the same as Ripple Effect but it disallows diagonal repeats.

frisia• 30 days ago

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?

sevenzero2• 30 days ago

This is why I've built my own Sudoku. Offline, no timer, no fail count, just pick up and play... Will come in handy on flights later this year x)

ralferoo• 30 days ago

Yeah, I didn't like the mistake feature because it flags it as soon as you make the error. In my case, it was actually a miss-click, so whilst I was confident with the answer I wanted to put, knowing that it had effectively just confirmed that for me made it feel like I was cheating. I'd rather make the mistake with no feedback, find the duplicate and go through the process of working out what was wrong, just as I would with paper.

EDIT: just played a hard game, and genuinely made a mistake. Having it tell me immediately definitely was cheating as there was then only one other answer that square could have been.

HaxleRose48• 30 days ago

Fair criticism. I appreciate the feedback! I thought I made the backspace key work on Sudoku. I'll look into that. I know "E" works for erase. Just checked it and if the incorrect answer is selected, you can press "E" or "delete"/"backspace" and that should clear the incorrect answer. As for the fail counter, it's so that the leaderboards are fair. If someone can just faceroll the keyboard to solve the puzzle quickly, it's not really fair for the leaderboards. But I get it. Sudoku isn't typically really a competitive puzzle and when doing them on paper, you often will erase wrong answers and keep going.

cwmoore2• 29 days ago

I am used to 0 and backspace, not too difficult to allow 0 key to clear a cell.

Curious if you could let me know what code or images provide the backgrounds on your Kakuro, is it a CSS diagonal line, or a tile? What comes up if you run a quick:

    find . -name diag.png -type f

Reminds me of mine!

sevenzero2• 30 days ago

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.

hitanshu326• 30 days ago

what was the hardest part of the puzzle validation logic detecting unique solutions or handling edge cases in user input?

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

Different puzzles have different validation logic. So the logic varies from puzzle to puzzle. Generally we're working backwards from a completed puzzle.

cwmoore2• 30 days ago

I’m personally invested in a Kakuro variant I have built, and a print book[0] in the past few years, manually. I have recently augmented the website with Claude Code.[1]

So I am in a position to notice a design choice that I made appear in a somewhat substantially vibe-coded collection.

Though not a globally unique or revolutionary design element, the diagonal pinstripe background in this site’s Kakuro looks surprisingly similar to my own.

[0] https://a.co/d/88Y82x6

[1] https://www.kakurokokoro.com

jmrko• 30 days ago

This is great, thank you! I predict agentic coding will change software dramatically in this direction. I recently had my weather app showing me a full-screen video ad. It drove me so mad that I developed wwads in a few hours with claude, Weather Without Ads (or any tracking, etc.), which can be installed as a PWA on Android or iOS. https://jmrk84.github.io/wwads/

nullify88• 30 days ago

What a great idea! I've grown pretty frustrated by the ads and constant nags for subscriptions modern weather apps pester you with. I've resorted to the state developed apps in Norway and Denmark but yours seems like a great alternative too.

HaxleRose48• 30 days ago

nice! good idea! I haven't looked into doing a PWA. I've never built one before, but this puzzle app is built with Ruby on Rails and I know the framework has tools for doing PWAs

a_c2• 30 days ago

Indeed. I started coding games/math exercise for my children to make sure they are ads free, and no monetisation shenanigans. I can totally see how it become a new trend.

AlexeyBelov• 29 days ago

We will probably get 100 new apps for any little thing, this part is true. But I still predict 90% will be garbage, or have tracking / ads. So overall the users don't win once again.

cess11• 30 days ago

Tried the hard nonogram, it was way too easy and annoying that I wasn't allowed to see if there are harder ones.

I prefer Bicross RPG.

https://smallandnearlysilent.com/bicross/rpg/

athrowaway3z• 30 days ago

I hadn't seen star battle before. Was fun. Wanted to play another medium one so created an account and it opened up the same puzzle, so then i just clicked through what i remembered and now i'm way too high on the leaderboard. I feel like a fraud!

HaxleRose48• 30 days ago

oh shoot! I'll look into that. Star Battle is the most recent puzzle game I added and I'm still working out the bugs!

ed_• 30 days ago

I had the same idea as well! https://puzzleparlour.co.uk/

There are still a couple of bugs to iron out, but people seem to like the original Gravity Words game.

ghtbircshotbe• 30 days ago

Anyone know of a free version of spelling bee?

joshdick• 30 days ago

I did the same thing! I was playing nonogram puzzles a lot in an ad-infested iPhone app, got sick of the ads, and replaced it with my own site:

https://karstendick.github.io/nonogram/

dmd• 29 days ago

Or you could use https://krazydad.com/ which has been around for decades, contains interesting puzzles many of which are types the author invented, and isn't AI slop.

baxbyte• 29 days ago

Very nice! Similar to PuzzlePage.app as well

jokethrowaway• 29 days ago

Great work! Always love more competition driving better products.

I'd make a non competitive mode without mistakes system: I love the puzzles, idgaf about leaderboards

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

Thanks for your feedback. I agree and am converting each puzzle to remove the mistake system and allow the user to click a button when they've completed the puzzle to see if it's correct.

lsaferite• 29 days ago

My next vacation project is basically this, but as an offline-capable PWA served from a 100% static site. I don't want to install apps for these types of games and I want them to fully function on my phone when I'm offline.

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

That would be pretty cool!

ne11nn• 29 days ago

this is great! i can't believe there aren't more of these. does anyone have any suggestions for mobile versions that can be played offline?

carl_dr• 29 days ago

I would love keyboard shortcuts to toggle (for example) pencil mode, or line/empty mode, and other quality of life improvements so I don't have to keep my mouse in one hand!

HaxleRose48• 27 days ago

Many of them have keyboard shortcuts. usually pencil mode is "P" and eraser is "E" or "backspace/delete". Also, the numbers 1, 2, 3 should work as well. Feel free to email me at ChestertonTechnologies@gmail.com if something isn't working!

snayan• 24 days ago

Why did you move away from the 3 strikes and you lose rule? The check function gives a lot less feedback, and for some of the larger puzzles, you end up trying to find a needle in a haystack to fix a single error, which, I just don't have the patience for hah. Preferred the original system. There's also a side effect that the leaderboard is biased towards those in the 3 strikes era, average solve time definitely increases now I'd suspect.

Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site

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