alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
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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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
It won't even let me play sudoku if I don't sign-in.
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?
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?
If you want image nonograms (as opposed to randomized nonograms), you can try Nonoverse[1]; I made it for the same reasons.
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
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.
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)
> Play in dark mode
Only after you create an account? Oh my lord
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love it. Inspiring me to upgrade my puzzle game site.
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
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.
Why ask for an account / sign up at all?
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.
You know if this site gets popular and takes off, you could probably monetize it...with ads
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?
Nice job! I made something similar, mostly for myself: https://www.vexling.com
Plan to keep it forever free :)
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.
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.
The homepage is a little overwhelming, other than that cool site
The "Hard" big diamond nonogram was not hard at all. Are you vibe-coding these?
Nice! A few word games would be cool: scrabble, boggle, etc.
eventually hosting costs money, so ads will be needed
Not really sure if you can call Nonogram a puzzle, when you give the answer right in the title.
Now I just need an ad-free save the doggo from the bees site. =)
> 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?
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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.