puzzles

[monkeyclogs]

as I complete my daily ritual of NYT puzzles over morning coffee. I'm wondering if others have favourite puzzles.

in the NYT app i love pips, connections and strands at the moment. Eventually I switch puzzles type so would love to know what everyone else plays and other puzzle sources.

so puzzlers, what's your fix?

 

[Outdated]

Sudoku.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

Only like real life puzzles.

 

[monkeyclogs]

Only like real life puzzles.

those tend do drive insane. very messy

 

[Misery]

Stuff like Rubik's Cubes.

I've got so many of the things and they get increasingly insane the further you get into the hobby.

They're all over my room here.

Usually they're just called "Twisty puzzles" by those who are into them, or sometimes just "cubes" even if they arent cubic. I've got like a... triangle something or other here next to the keyboard, I still just call it a cube.

 

[TouhouFan28]

I love love LOVE minesweeper. Lots of it surprisingly is pattern recognition and SOMETIMES theres gambling. But, it really does help your brain with logic and the rush you feel when you speed up and enter the flowstate is unreal. Highly recommend it since you can basically play it anywhere and on your browser.

 

[monkeyclogs]

Stuff like Rubik's Cubes.

I've got so many of the things and they get increasingly insane the further you get into the hobby.

They're all over my room here.

Usually they're just called "Twisty puzzles" by those who are into them, or sometimes just "cubes" even if they arent cubic. I've got like a... triangle something or other here next to the keyboard, I still just call it a cube.

my ex husband had a rubiks cube obsession. he'd spend hours practising ridiculous challenges like finishing it with one hand in a certain time frame. kind of took the fun out of the idea. Now you mention it though, and he's long gone maybe i should try one. thanks

 

[Lou Laurinen]

as I complete my daily ritual of NYT puzzles over morning coffee. I'm wondering if others have favourite puzzles.

in the NYT app i love pips, connections and strands at the moment. Eventually I switch puzzles type so would love to know what everyone else plays and other puzzle sources.

so puzzlers, what's your fix?

I have yet to try any of the NYT ones myself, but my mom loves Strands, and I think this is from another site, but she loves "Dogle"- basically a guessing game where you are given a nondescript photo of a tail or a snout or something and have to guess what type of dog it is.

 

[monkeyclogs]

I have yet to try any of the NYT ones myself, but my mom loves Strands, and I think this is from another site, but she loves "Dogle"- basically a guessing game where you are given a nondescript photo of a tail or a snout or something and have to guess what type of dog it is.

ooh definitely going to look that one up! thanks

 

[Misery]

I love love LOVE minesweeper. Lots of it surprisingly is pattern recognition and SOMETIMES theres gambling. But, it really does help your brain with logic and the rush you feel when you speed up and enter the flowstate is unreal. Highly recommend it since you can basically play it anywhere and on your browser.

Omigod I almost forgot about Minesweeper.

Though it's not traditional Minesweeper in my case usually, instead I've got this game:

So, this is Demoncrawl, it's basically Minesweeper if it took all of the drugs at once. Sorta roguelike-y, instead of just one board a single run is more like.... 13 stages, I think, with a couple of shops here and there.

There's an inventory of items you can get, all sorts of screwball things, stages can have modifiers that make it more difficult (for instance one that makes it so exactly 3 cell values will be wrong somewhere on the board), or all sorts of other bizarre things.

This screenshot is the last stage of a run, there's a boss roaming around a different area of the board with a passive effect that just says "you get hit every 30 seconds", I think it is, among a couple of other things he does. Only in rare cases can you actually kill a boss, usually you have to just sorta play around whatever screwball thing they do, so this whole board was me wildly trying to speedsolve it, which I can in fact do, specifically because of having done this boss many times. I always forget I learned to speedsolve Minesweeper until I play this and that guy shows up.

Also some other weird stuff happening there in that screenshot, it's a pretty wild game. Bloody brutal though. It's really freaking hard, not for anyone that cant deal with defeat, because you are going to lose often. I actually managed to win that run though, did the whole giant board in 51 seconds somehow (which had like 98 monsters/mines on it, I think it was), though near the end about a 5th of the board just exploded for some reason.

I just adore this freaking game, easily one of my top 5 games ever. It also has the single greatest soundtrack I've ever heard in a game. Which is still baffling, it's like, it's freaking Minesweeper, it doesnt need to go that hard, but it does.


I love it when developers come up with stuff that's like, hey, let's take this old classic game/puzzle/whatever and totally revamp it into something new.

Demoncrawl isnt the only "let's do more with Minesweeper" game out there either. Not surprising, since Minesweeper is such a classic.

 

[TouhouFan28]

Omigod I almost forgot about Minesweeper.

Though it's not traditional Minesweeper in my case usually, instead I've got this game:

View attachment 149132

So, this is Demoncrawl, it's basically Minesweeper if it took all of the drugs at once. Sorta roguelike-y, instead of just one board a single run is more like.... 13 stages, I think, with a couple of shops here and there.

There's an inventory of items you can get, all sorts of screwball things, stages can have modifiers that make it more difficult (for instance one that makes it so exactly 3 cell values will be wrong somewhere on the board), or all sorts of other bizarre things.

This screenshot is the last stage of a run, there's a boss roaming around a different area of the board with a passive effect that just says "you get hit every 30 seconds", I think it is, among a couple of other things he does. Only in rare cases can you actually kill a boss, usually you have to just sorta play around whatever screwball thing they do, so this whole board was me wildly trying to speedsolve it, which I can in fact do, specifically because of having done this boss many times. I always forget I learned to speedsolve Minesweeper until I play this and that guy shows up.

Also some other weird stuff happening there in that screenshot, it's a pretty wild game. Bloody brutal though. It's really freaking hard, not for anyone that cant deal with defeat, because you are going to lose often. I actually managed to win that run though, did the whole giant board in 51 seconds somehow (which had like 98 monsters/mines on it, I think it was), though near the end about a 5th of the board just exploded for some reason.

I just adore this freaking game, easily one of my top 5 games ever. It also has the single greatest soundtrack I've ever heard in a game. Which is still baffling, it's like, it's freaking Minesweeper, it doesnt need to go that hard, but it does.


I love it when developers come up with stuff that's like, hey, let's take this old classic game/puzzle/whatever and totally revamp it into something new.

Demoncrawl isnt the only "let's do more with Minesweeper" game out there either. Not surprising, since Minesweeper is such a classic.

this sounds sick, i definitely wanna try it. Is it free? Where do I get it? C:

 

[Misery]

this sounds sick, i definitely wanna try it. Is it free? Where do I get it? C:

Steam.

Normally it costs $15, right now it's 50% off for like the next week, I think it is.

Just be aware that this is one of those games that's seriously designed for the long haul. I've got like 250 hours in it and I'm not even remotely close to seeing/doing everything.

It's also got a *nasty* learning curve and some things can be darned confusing. Like there's a lot of different masteries you can pick from (basically character classes), every one of them has 3 tiers... so they're not *fully* unlocked until all 3 tiers are done... and good freaking luck figuring out how to meet some of the screwy conditions needed to pull off the unlocks. I still dont have all of them, some of them are like, how in the funky heck am I supposed to meet that particular condition? Like one of them focuses a lot on legendary items, and the intial unlock condition is to finish a run while holding 2 legendary items. You are only allowed to have one legendary at a time. Good luck figuring that one out.

Whole game is stuffed full of things like that. And of course you're dealing with all of this and all these other wild things while still running into Minesweeper's traditional hard points, like the dreaded 50/50 guess. I think that's why many people bounce off of this one, because it just isnt going to allow you to have like 100 wins in a row on high difficulty or whatever. A lot of games seem to have gotten playes used to just constantly winning all the time. Not this one.


Also if you decide to have a go at it, the store page for it seems to be a bit bugged (or at least it was yesterday). Some players are reporting that the buy button for it aint working right or something. The devs are working with Valve to fix this, and have said that if it takes a couple of days to fix or whatever, they'll just extend the sale by that long. So if it aint going through when you try to pick it up, just wait a couple of days.

I love Steam and all but every now and then it'll get all borked in a way that just doesnt make any sense at all. Can be really quite irritating.