I’m a big fan of exercising the “little grey cells” as Hercule Poirot calls them. I’ve played my fair share of daily puzzles but recently have settled into a pretty fixed routine. It was pretty tough for me to find resources on these so I figured I’d share out my routine and other puzzles I play less regularly.
Stars#
Stars by Inkwell Games is your classic N-Star Battle. In this case, N = 2. The goal is to place stars so that each region, row, and column have 2 stars each. Stars cannot touch each other, including on diagonals.
A faily simple set of rules that leads to a fun logic game. Inkwell Games has a great blog post on strategies.
Fields#
Another entry from Inkwell Games is Fields. It is definitely convenient to play these right after each other. I wasn’t originally into this game as I felt I was just guessing/stumbling into the answers but it has started to grow on me.
The goal of Fields is to fill the grid with green and blue fields that never touch. The grid starts with numbered colored fields that tell you how many continguous cells make up that field. There are also “?” fields which require you to determine the right number of cells.
Inkwell Games has a whole series of posts starting here with tips and tricks.
Both Stars and Fields follow a weekly difficulty curve. Monday is the easiest and Sunday is the hardest. Some of the Sunday puzzles can get pretty brutal and have taken me up to 30 minutes each to solve. A great way to spend a Sunday morning!
There are likely other places to play games like these, but I really appreciate the clear human touch of the puzzle designs. It’s difficult to describe but there’s a tangible humanity in the puzzles that is missing from puzzles that are just infinitely algorithmically generated.
Clues by Sam#
Clues by Sam is just pure, unadulterated logic and I love it. Everyone is either a criminal or innocent. It’s up to you to determine which is with based on the clues given. All clues are true, even if they are from a criminal.
The fundamental premise of the game makes it so that there is only one solution. Thus, you cannot just guess your way to success. You cannot accidentally reveal information.1 You can only deduce certain pieces of information from what is given. A fun little thing about this is how the game designer uses this fact to build little narratives within the puzzle as criminals/innocents can only be revealed in specific orders.
Daily Chess Puzzle#
Honestly, I don’t have too much to say about the daily puzzle from chess.com. They’re fun and ramp up in difficulty throughout the week. As of time of writing, I’m sitting on a 530 day streak. It would be much longer, but my streak broke when we lost power and internet for 5 days in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. So my chess puzzle streak serves simultaneously as a daily reminder of that experience and a representation of how much time has passed since then.
enclose.horse#
My partner laughed at me when I said I was playing a game called enclose.horse. A pretty reasonable reaction honestly. It’s a silly name with a silly premise. There is a horse. You want to create the largest possible enclosure for it given a limited number walls.
It’s a spatial reasoning/logic game. There are elements that shake things up like fruit that give you more points, bees that subtract points, and portals! You only get one chance to submit.
As of time of writing, the game recently added a “Check” feature which allows you to see if you’ve created the optimal score before submitting. While I understand the idea, I’m not a huge fan of this as I enjoyed the experience of not knowing before I submit. I know I could just not use that feature but it’s hard to when it’s just right there.
Minute Cryptic#
This is a weird one for me. Minute Cryptic breaks from the “pure logic” theme rather dramatically. Instead, it’s a single cryptic crossword clue created by a member.
Minute Cryptic requires a strange sort of lateral thinking which I don’t get to exercise very often. It reminds me of those rebus puzzles I would do as a kid.2 There’s a very helpful hint system which I use regularly but over time I’ve started to learn how to think about these and rely on the hints less.
Honorable Mentions#
If I had infinite time, I’d probably play a lot more games. I’ve included a list of other games I play on and off that you might enjoy!
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I suppose you could come to right answer with the wrong logic. Edmund Gettier strikes again! ↩︎
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You know, like when you were a kid and you did the “gifted kid” program that would pull you out of class to do things like solve rebus puzzles or design paper airplanes or build structures out of popsicles sticks and then put them throuh an earthquake simulation. Normal kid things that everyone did. ↩︎