Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by Azrael3000
  • They should be unique solutions. The way I generate the puzzles requires them to have a unique solution. I've thought I found a couple that were not unique, but then both times, I was missing a cell I could eliminate. But let me know at ChestertonTechnologies@gmail.com with the puzzle number and difficulty if you find one and I'll look into it!
    by HaxleRose
  • 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.
    What's a monetization prompt?
    by ori_b
  • It's referring to the fact that after you complete 25 puzzles of a specific difficulty, it'll prompt you to unlock all the puzzles for a couple bucks. Helps offset server costs to run the site. So the comment in the code is addressing if a user has viewed that prompt or not. So not a "prompt" in the LLM sense.
    by HaxleRose
  • 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.

    https://github.com/FelineStateMachine/puzzletea

    by FelineStateMach
  • 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.

    by rmunn
  • Good feedback. I do plan on continuing to add other kinds of logic puzzles to the site as time permits. I'll check out those sites!
    by HaxleRose
  • 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.

    by furyofantares
  • Yep, I feel ya. Good feedback. This is like version 3 of the home page. The first two looked very typical AI. I thought maybe a newspaper vibe might be cool as a throwback to the puzzles you'd do in the paper. But it does have some of those cookie cutter AI tells. I'm a software engineer by trade and not much of a designer honestly. This probably won't be the final form of the home page, I'd imagine.
    by HaxleRose
  • 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

    by cbxyp
  • Nice, mobile layouts could improve… couldn’t bet in roulette
    by FailMore
  • 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

    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.

    by circuitqed
  • Crossjam is a fun one!
    by zeroonetwothree
  • 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?
    by frisia
  • This is why I've built my own Sudoku. Offline, no timer, no fail count, just pick up and play... Will come in handy on flights later this year x)
    by sevenzero
  • Yeah, I didn't like the mistake feature because it flags it as soon as you make the error. In my case, it was actually a miss-click, so whilst I was confident with the answer I wanted to put, knowing that it had effectively just confirmed that for me made it feel like I was cheating. I'd rather make the mistake with no feedback, find the duplicate and go through the process of working out what was wrong, just as I would with paper.

    EDIT: just played a hard game, and genuinely made a mistake. Having it tell me immediately definitely was cheating as there was then only one other answer that square could have been.

    by ralferoo
  • Fair criticism. I appreciate the feedback! I thought I made the backspace key work on Sudoku. I'll look into that. I know "E" works for erase. Just checked it and if the incorrect answer is selected, you can press "E" or "delete"/"backspace" and that should clear the incorrect answer. As for the fail counter, it's so that the leaderboards are fair. If someone can just faceroll the keyboard to solve the puzzle quickly, it's not really fair for the leaderboards. But I get it. Sudoku isn't typically really a competitive puzzle and when doing them on paper, you often will erase wrong answers and keep going.
    by HaxleRose
  • > Create a free account to keep playing.

    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?

    by zx8080
  • Nope, I don't care about your email. Just a way for you to track progress, contribute to leaderboards, get achievements, and be able to reset your password if you forget it. The end-goal was originally just for me to have an ad-free place for me to play my favorite puzzle games and I shared it with HN. I do ask for a couple bucks after a solver finishes 25 of every puzzle + difficulty just to help out with server costs. But I don't dream that I'll even break even on this.

    I'm a software engineer for my job and just code apps for a fun hobby in my spare time. Pretty much, most every software engineer uses agentic AI coding tools these days. I built this the same way I build software for my job. So it's not some slop codebase with API keys sitting in the HTML :)

    by HaxleRose
  • I have been playing nonograms for a year now, there was never insta death, controls are a little off, title is hidden until its solved to avoid spoilers This is obviously programmed by someone who doesn't play nonograms. Safe to assume it was vibe-coded
    by blourvim
  • 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.
    by underyx
  • I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.

    And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.

    by pred_
  • The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
    by HaxleRose
  • I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.

    Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.

    by miguel-muniz
  • 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/
    by jmrko
  • nice! good idea! I haven't looked into doing a PWA. I've never built one before, but this puzzle app is built with Ruby on Rails and I know the framework has tools for doing PWAs
    by HaxleRose
  • Indeed. I started coding games/math exercise for my children to make sure they are ads free, and no monetisation shenanigans. I can totally see how it become a new trend.
    by a_c
  • We will probably get 100 new apps for any little thing, this part is true. But I still predict 90% will be garbage, or have tracking / ads. So overall the users don't win once again.
    by AlexeyBelov
  • What a great idea! I've grown pretty frustrated by the ads and constant nags for subscriptions modern weather apps pester you with. I've resorted to the state developed apps in Norway and Denmark but yours seems like a great alternative too.
    by nullify88
  • 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.)

    by pavel_lishin