Puzzle games

Puzzle games

Two people arrive at this page wanting opposite things. One typed something like match 3 games and wants a board to sink into with the thinking part switched off. The other typed something like brain games and wants to be made to work. Both are in the right place, and the seventeen titles here divide almost evenly between them — so the first job of this page is to send you down the correct half.

The half you play to go quiet

Match-three boards dominate the shelf. You swap two neighbouring pieces, three of a kind vanish, everything above drops into the gap, and occasionally the drop makes another match without you doing anything. That last part is the whole appeal: the board rewards you while you sit still.

Because they share one rule, the differences that matter are elsewhere. The Halloween board runs in twenty-second rounds, which turns you into someone hunting the first match visible. A board with no clock turns you into someone scanning for the chain instead. Piece count matters more than it sounds — fewer distinct symbols means easier moves and more frequent chains. So does the artwork, since you will stare at it for several minutes: Jelly Match 3 is sweets on deep purple, Monster Match 3 is a beach with palm trees and loud creatures, Christmas Match 3 is baubles on a snowy slope. Choosing the picture you want to look at is a better method than choosing the name you liked.

One technique carries across all of them: work upwards from the bottom row. Clearing low makes the entire board fall and re-arrange itself, and some of those landings are free matches. Clearing from the top row spends your move tidying pieces that were about to move anyway.

The half that makes you work

Casino Cards Memory lays face-down cards on green felt with chips scattered around the table, and measures nothing except how many positions you can hold in your head. Memory Game runs the same rule wrapped in witches and a haunted house on purple — filed here rather than on the horror shelf, which is worth knowing if you came for memory games and would rather not meet a ghost. Schitalochka and the arithmetic titles sit on this side too.

Crossword For Kids is the one that most deserves a warning, because the name and the game disagree. There is no crossword grid anywhere in it. What appears is three open book pages with numbers scattered across them, a twenty-second countdown in the top-left corner, and smiling balloons drifting behind. It is a spotting game, and it works whether or not you read the language it is written in.

Playing with nothing counting down

If the appeal for you is a board that never hurries, the untimed set gathers those from this shelf and from others into one list, so you do not have to open boards one by one to find out which ones start a countdown.

Questions about boards and brains

How many puzzle games are on this shelf?

Seventeen, the second-largest shelf in the library, and more than half of those are match-three boards.

Aren't all the match-three games basically the same game?

The rules are, yes. What is not the same is round length, board size, number of piece types and theme — and those four decide whether you stay for one round or twenty. Pick by clock first, picture second.

Does memory count as the same genre as matching?

They pull on different faculties. Matching tests what you can see on a board that is fully revealed; memory tests what you can recall about a board that has been hidden. Living under one label does not make them one experience.

Which boards are awkward on a phone?

The dense ones. On a small screen the difficulty stops being the puzzle and becomes your fingertip covering the square you were aiming at, so fewer cells and no countdown is the combination that travels best.