Nine Kinds of Puzzle

Logic Pad started as a brief I would have sacked a consultant for. Until today it made six kinds of puzzle. Now it makes nine. The new three are below. They are free like the rest, they need no sign-up, and they work with the phone in flight mode.

Hashi

The Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli calls it Hashiwokakero, “build bridges!” Numbered islands sit on a grid. Join them all into one network with straight bridges, one or two between any pair, never crossing, until every island has exactly as many bridges as its number. On screen you drag from island to island. Easy is 7 × 7, hard is 13 × 13, and hard is where the evening goes.

Like everything else on the site, a hashi is generated rather than stored. You only see it once the machine has proved it has exactly one answer and can be solved without guessing.

Word search

Fourteen themes, from the beach to the bush to old technology. Easy words run across and down; hard ones run any way at all, backwards included.

The part nobody sees is the filler. The letters between the hidden words are random, and random letters will, given enough grids, spell something you would not hand to a school class. So before a grid is shown, every line in all eight directions is checked against a list of words that must not turn up by accident. The list is stored as scrambled codes, so nobody has to read it to maintain it.

Word wheel

The one the papers call Target: nine letters, one in the middle, make as many words as you can. Every word must use the middle letter. No names, and no plurals ending in s, so CATS is out and GLASS is in.

A word wheel lives or dies on its dictionary. Type a real word, get told no, and you stop trusting it. So the list is SCOWL, a spelling dictionary with an Australian edition, trimmed of 13,907 plurals and a few hundred words I will not be printing here. One more word very nearly became a puzzle. In testing, the wheel picked EXCREMENT as its nine-letter word, which is technically a fine word and entirely the wrong note for a Sunday morning. It has been retired.

On paper too

All three go into the printed packs, with the answers at the back and a QR code on every page. The test book for this release mixed every kind that prints (the case files stay on screen) and ran to 43 pages in both Chrome and Safari, on A4 and Letter, without one page break in the wrong place. The rules for all nine are on the how-to page.

I am told the hard hashi is fair. I am not yet convinced.