Game compendium

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

In the early days of computing, before the emergence of even single developer AAA games, you could buy collections of well-known, traditional pre-computer games. These were usually put together from source code or ideas that had been knocking around universities in the 1970s, pooled into a single collection with a menu, and sold in the back pages of a newspaper's Sunday supplement. These collections would often include games like checkers, crosswords, word searches, and even board or card games with simple AI opponents, with just enough variation to fill a rainy afternoon.

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection feels very similar to those old compendiums. It's composed of 39 separate, simple, portable logic games that can all be played on your own whenever you have a spare five minutes to kill or need to switch context to help with concentration. Simon Tatham is also the author of the essential PuTTY SSH client for Microsoft Windows, helping thousands of Windows users access the joys of Linux servers running SSH. If you're familiar with PuTTY's functional and slightly austere UI, you'll know what to expect from these games. Usually, the only UI is a menu and the game itself, with which you can interact using the mouse, and quite a number of the games you'll have experienced before. Sudoku, Minefield, Mastermind, Solitaire, and Pipes all have open source (and renamed) equivalents, and it's a real nostalgia trip playing many of the games.

Names are purely descriptive, rather than hinting at the inspiration behind some of the games. Netslide, for example, is like an image-sliding game, where the image itself is a network that needs to be connected. Same Game requires you to remove touching groups of the same color, and Map has a similar challenge with a Risk-style playing field. The graphics may be perfunctory, but they're perfectly suited to the genre and style of the games. When there's animation, it's executed so smoothly you can hardly see the frames. Examples include the walking 3D cube in Cube, the compass bearing of the arrow as you drag and drop to make a link in Signpost, and the line dragging in Untangle as you attempt to position the points so the lines don't cross.

Every game requires some considered thinking, and each is different enough to present a contrasting challenge, initially as you work out how to win, and then by playing and increasing the skill level or the size of the game area from the menu. The menu can also be used to save the current state of the game, undo or redo moves, set specific seeds, and even solve the current screen if it all gets too much for you. Like those original compendiums, many of the games are simple and quick enough to play, but they're also like jazz standards or simple chord progressions, being the foundation for many other games or ideas that could be more ambitious. Because it's completely open source, cross-platform (including iOS and Android), and even ported to JavaScript, you can study the code, make your own changes, and easily build your own to add to the collection.

Project Website

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

1 Same Game: Clear the grid by linking colors. 2 Map: Clear the grid by never linking colors. 3 Signpost: Make a path out of arrow directions. 4 Pegs: Jump pegs and remove the jumped peg to clear the board. 5 Flip: Light groups of squares. 6 Cube: Roll a cube (or other 3D shape) over a path to clear up the squares. 7 Bridges: Connect the island and make more large bridges. 8 Guess: Try to work out the colors hidden at the bottom. 9 Dominosa: Dominoes.