About Puzzle-Me
Puzzle-Me started from a simple irritation: wanting to play a quick puzzle and having to sit through a video ad, close a pop-up, accept a newsletter and create an account before reaching the board.
So this site does the opposite. No registration, no video interstitials, no pop-ups, no countdown before you can play. You click a game and the game starts. There are ads, and they are what pays for hosting and for the time spent building the games, but they live beside the board and never on top of it. If an ad ever covers a puzzle or interrupts a round, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
What you will find
Twenty-eight games today, and more on the way — the plan is to pass a hundred, at a pace of a few new titles a month. They are sorted by family: logic, numbers, words, geography and reflexes. The full list shows every one, with its difficulty and how long a round takes.
Every game has its own page with the rules, ideas on strategy, and a note on where the idea came from. And every game has a global leaderboard, so a good round means something beyond the moment it happened.
All of these are original creations, designed and programmed for this site. None of them is a licensed clone, a bought template or a reskin of somebody else's game. Some of them work in traditions that belong to everybody, such as the Latin square behind sudoku or the classic block-pushing puzzle, but the rules, the levels, the code and the texts are ours.
Languages
The site is available in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, and most of the games are too, including their rules and their help texts. Where a game is not yet translated, that is said on its page. Portuguese here is European Portuguese.
Where it runs
Everything runs in the browser. There is nothing to install, no plugin, no extension, no app store. Any reasonably recent version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge will do.
The games work on a phone, on a tablet and on a desktop computer, with touch, with a mouse or with the keyboard. Several were designed for one hand on a phone screen first, and then adapted upwards.
Who makes this
Puzzle-Me is an independent project, made and maintained from the Atlantic coast of Portugal. It is not a studio and not a company with a team: every game here was chosen, tested and tuned by hand until it worked, and the site and its four translations are looked after the same way.
It started out of stubbornness. There were puzzles I wanted to play that did not exist — or existed buried under video ads, forced accounts and notification prompts. Making one turned out to be less work than carrying on looking. Then there were two. Today there are forty-two, and the list is not stopping here.
What interests me in a puzzle is not difficulty for its own sake. It is the moment when a simple rule reveals a consequence that was not in plain sight. A good game explains itself in one sentence and takes months to master. That is the bar I aim for each time — and it is why some take weeks to finish and others never leave the drawer.
There is one idea running through the whole site that I am particularly fond of: the daily challenge. Every day, everyone who opens the same game gets exactly the same puzzle — the same grid, the same hidden country, the same constellation. Someone in Coimbra, someone in Bogotá and someone in Osaka looking at the same problem on the same day, each in their own hour. It is a quiet way of all being in the same room.
The site is free and will stay that way. Advertising pays for the hosting; the rest is time given gladly. If this ever stops being fun to make, it stops being worth doing — but so far, each new game has been the best reason to start the next one.
Say something
If you have an idea for a game, if a puzzle seems wrong, if a translation reads badly, or if you simply want to say which one you liked, the contact page has the address. Suggestions are read, answered and often end up changing a game.
Meanwhile, the full list of games is here.
