Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed in from elsewhere.
For still other games (such as Sixteen), automatic solution tells you nothing about how to get to the solution, but it does provide a useful way to get there quickly so that you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations.
For other games (such as Pattern), the solved state can be used to give you information, if you can't see how a solution can exist at all or you want to know where you made a mistake. For some games (Cube) this feature is not supported at all because it is of no particular use. Transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. (You can undo moves back to the start of the session.)Ĭopies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so that you can paste it into (say) an e-mail client or a web message board if you're discussing the game with someone else. (Only for puzzles which make sense to print, of course – it's hard to think of a sensible printable representation of Fifteen!) Where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a dialog allowing you to print an arbitrary number of puzzles randomly generated from the current parameters, optionally including the current puzzle. The Load and Save operations preserve your entire game history (so you can save, reload, and still Undo and Redo things you had done before saving). Saves the current state of your game to a file on disk. Resets the current game to its initial state. Starts a new game, with a random initial state.
(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead.) These actions are all available from the ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, in addition to any game-specific actions. This chapter describes features that are common to all the games. Especially if they provide a new front end (to make all these games run on another platform), or a new game. Please report bugs to You might find it helpful to read this article before reporting a bug: The most recent versions, and source code, can be found at. This means that you can do pretty much anything you like with the game binaries or the code, except pretending you wrote them yourself, or suing me if anything goes wrong. This collection is distributed under the MIT licence (see appendix A). (I don't even claim authorship of all the code some of the puzzles have been submitted by other authors.) I do not claim credit, in general, for inventing the rules of any of these puzzles. The actual games in this collection were mostly not my invention they are re-implementations of existing game concepts within my portable puzzle framework. And if anyone feels like writing any other front ends – PocketPC, Mac OS pre-10, or whatever it might be – then all the games in this framework will immediately become available on another platform as well. When I find (or perhaps invent) further puzzle games that I like, they'll be added to this collection and will immediately be available on both platforms.
And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn't available the next time I was sitting at a Windows machine, or vice versa so I arranged that everything in my personal puzzle collection will happily run on both, and have more recently done a port to Mac OS X as well. I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing. See appendix A for the licence text in full. You may distribute this documentation under the MIT licence.
This manual is copyright 2004-2010 Simon Tatham. This is a collection of small one-player puzzle games. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection