Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is a popular collection of small one-player video puzzle games for PCs written by Simon Tatham and others, using a framework written especially for portability to other platforms. Some of the games are original but most are re-implementations of existing game concepts, such as Nikoli puzzles.

Due to the nature of the collection framework, any game written using the simple game API can be ported to many platforms without modification. There is extensive documentation for developers of both games and "frontends". As of April 2008 there were 27 separate puzzles in the collection, not including variations and the multiple difficulty levels within each of the games.

The official site hosts versions for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, and provides source files for compiling the software for Unix using GTK+. The collection is free software published under an MIT License, with ports being having been developed for the Palm OS, Windows Mobile, GP2X and Nintendo DS homebrew (as "Puzzlemaniak").

Presentation

Each game in the collection runs in a window using 256 colors. They use standard controls but some vary from game to game. Every game includes undo/redo functionality as well as load/save. Most, but not all, of the games include a solver that will show the solution to both generated and hand-entered puzzles.

Games

;Black Box: Find the hidden balls in the box by bouncing laser beams off them.;Bridges: Connect all the islands with a network of bridges. (This game is also known as Hashiwokakero.);Cube: Pick up all the blue squares by rolling the cube over them.;Dominosa: Tile the rectangle with a full set of dominoes.;Fifteen: Slide the tiles around to arrange them into order.;Filling: Mark every square with the area of its containing region.;Flip: Flip groups of squares to light them all up at once.;Galaxies: Divide the grid into rotationally symmetric regions each centred on a dot.;Guess: Guess the hidden combination of colours. (A variant of Mastermind.);Inertia: Collect all the gems without running into any of the mines.;Light Up: Place bulbs to light up all the squares.;Loopy: Draw a single closed loop in accordance with the clues. (This game is also known as Slitherlink.);
Minesweeper.);Net: Rotate each tile to reassemble the network.;Netslide: Slide a row at a time to reassemble the network.;Pattern: Fill in the pattern in the grid, given only the lengths of runs of black squares. (This game is also known as Nonogram.);Pegs: Jump pegs over each other to remove all but one.;Rectangles: Divide the grid into rectangles with areas equal to the numbers. (This game is also known as Shikaku.);SameGame: Clear the grid by removing touching groups of the same colour squares.;Sixteen: Slide a row at a time to arrange the tiles into order.;Slant: Draw a maze of slanting lines that matches the clues. (This game is also known as Gokigen Naname.);Solo: Fill in the grid so that each row, column and square block contains one of every digit. (This game is commonly known as sudoku.);Tents: Place a tent next to each tree.;Twiddle: Rotate the tiles around themselves to arrange them into order.;Unequal: Complete the Latin square in accordance with the > signs. (This game is also known as Futoshiki.);Untangle: Reposition the points so that the lines do not cross. (This game is an implementation of Planarity.)

External links

* [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ Official site]
* [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~jharvey/puzzles/ Palm Puzzles port page]
* [http://code.google.com/p/portablepuzzlecollection-wm/ Updated Windows Mobile port]
* [http://www.ledow.org.uk/gp2x STPPC2x - GP2X/SDL port]