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/
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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/
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
// 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
(puzzlelair.com)235 points by HaxleRose 22 June 2026 | 145 comments
Comments
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
https://karstendick.github.io/nonogram/
- 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.
There are still a couple of bugs to iron out, but people seem to like the original Gravity Words game.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
[1]: https://lab174.com/nonoverse
Only after you create an account? Oh my lord
https://github.com/FelineStateMachine/puzzletea
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
No monetization of any kind other than a slightly hidden donate button.
And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?
Plan to keep it forever free :)
Now waiting already for a week for Apple greenlighting my iOS update for the level builder...
I prefer Bicross RPG.
https://smallandnearlysilent.com/bicross/rpg/
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.
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?