Friday Fun: Week One

Who doesn't need to take a break and have some fun? On Fridays, I will post about fun things I have found online. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do. They may be games, videos, books, puzzles, quizzes, fun for kids, and fun for grownups.

Good things come in small packages. A year or two ago, I downloaded several small puzzle games from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection page. I see that several puzzles have been added since then. The game called Solo is the same as Sudoku. You can play an easy Solo game or an extremely difficult Solo game. You can customize the size of the grid, use pencil marks, and save a game in progress. All Simon Tatham's puzzles are customizable and lots of fun. Even if you download the whole set, you will use only a small amount of computer resources. The games run on Unix, on Windows, and on Mac OS X. They are free of charge.

My favorite game of the bunch, Pattern, is similar to Paint by numbers , a Japanese logic puzzle. Griddlers.net is a good online source of these challenging puzzles. There are thousands of puzzles to choose from, with more being created daily. You can register to save your games in progress and join the Griddlers.net community. You might even become addicted.

Sudoku puzzles are easy to find online. Braingle is one possible starting place. You can choose your difficulty level and play as many games as you want. Braingle can be added to your Google Homepage. Fiendish Sudoku posts five new puzzles every day and offers an archive with hundreds of puzzles. The puzzles are hand created and are easy, moderate, hard, evil, or fiendish. Give them a try. Samurai Sudoku puzzles consist of five overlapping grids. They can be easy to "fiendish". This site has a daily puzzle and a large archive. If you want to pit your Sudoku solving skills against others, try the online speed challenge at Sudoku Fun. You might make it onto the leader board.

This is an image of a Nonomino Sudoku, also known as a Jigsaw Sudoku (and at least a dozen other names.) You can download PDF files of Nonominos at boldts.net. Each file contains 100 puzzles, so there's enough to keep you busy for a long time. I hope I get a printer soon, so I can download, print, and solve all these puzzles.

Take a break today.