Games

Learn to solve logic puzzles one deduction technique at a time — 55 puzzles across seven chapters, from filling the last empty cell to spotting a rectangle of candidates. Guided, practice and mastery puzzles, escalating hints, no clock.

Match three on a bar top: beer, wine, skulls, chillies, shots and dice upstairs, a members' club behind the cellar door, and the burlesque stage above them for season three. Thirty-six rounds, three sets of icons. Line up four for a party popper, five for a keg bomb, and clear the barrels before last orders.

The updated build — nineteen nights across two seasons, ten of them new. Set the room and keep the club alive: five towers, thirteen enemy types and seven bosses, with a story panel between the sets.

Three classic fields and a daily, and not one of them needs a guess: a board is built around your first tap and thrown away if a solver cannot clear it by deduction alone. Tap to open, hold to flag, tap a number to clear its neighbours. Best times are kept per size.

An idle tank: tap a grown colony to sell it, plant again, and spend the credits on light, flow, rock and livestock until all twenty-four slots are full. Every fish speeds growth and raises phosphate — scrub it, skim it, change the water, or algae takes the space. Eight hours of growth is waiting when you come back, and nothing in the tank ever dies.

One puzzle a day, the same for everyone: six numbers and a target. Reach it with plus, minus, times and divide in as few steps as you can, and match par to take three stars. No timer, no lives, no streak to lose if you skip a day. Undo and start over are free.

Twenty-four five-by-five minis in three sets of eight, ten clues each: five across, five down, two or four black squares. Pick a set, tap a square, type, tap it again to turn the corner, and check or reveal a letter or a word if you stall. One puzzle is today's; all twenty-four are playable any time and your half-finished grid is saved.

The mini crossword's filthy cousin: eight five-by-five grids, ten clues each, written like a very rude dictionary. Adult slang, bad decisions and jokes you would not repeat at work. Same rules as Ten Across — tap a square, type, turn the corner, check or reveal when you stall.

Motel room 12 at four in the morning: three of you, and everything coming up the stairs shows its move before it makes it. Move, fire, shove — every enemy telegraphs the square it will hit, so the whole turn can be read before you commit. Eight rooms, and each one was thrown away unless a solver could win it and a careless hand could not.

You keep the door of the Velvet Vault open until four. Every problem walks in as one card with two answers, and every answer moves four numbers — takings, cast, licence, buzz — each of which is a disaster at both ends. Eight nights, a hundred and twenty-four cards, and a cast that remembers what you did to them.

You are the machine behind the coat check: the door brings coats in, your two hands hold one each, the rack remembers, and the counter is where they all have to end up. Fourteen instructions and ten shifts, each one a single idea — take a coat, do something to it, put it back, and know when to stop. The first shift is taught step by step, and nothing moves until you have actually done it.

You book the acts for a variety club: ten nights, one house a night, and the better bill takes the room. Three gold books an act from tonight's book, and booking the same act again doubles it — twice more and it triples. Thirty acts, eight tricks, and ten houses with bills of their own, each one tuned until a well-booked line-up beats it about three nights in four. Front acts strike together, nothing is rolled, and the same bill always plays the same fight.

You begin as chemistry in a warm ocean and end as something that builds the next thing. Tap for entropy, spend it on forty-two nodes across nine eras — cell, colony, shell, fern, egg, eye, city, orbit — and the specimen in front of you changes as the era does. Six optional branches multiply everything, discoveries pay Insight, and when the tree runs out you can metamorphose and keep what you learned. Progress keeps running while you are away.

One person, from the night the landing light goes off to the last quiet afternoon. Choose a face you will grow into and a family to be born into, then spend three actions a year and answer one card about the year that has just happened — a hundred and twenty of them, from a school corridor to a hospital ward. Health, happiness, smarts and looks all decay and have to be defended; the traits you pick up early become the shape of the whole life. Thirty minutes, one run, and a score at the end you will want to argue with.

One champion, ten suits, and a city deciding whether to keep trial by combat. Pick a stance and an action, fight for the distance your blade wants, and spend what you earn between suits on steel, iron or a surgeon — seventy scenes decide what kind of champion reaches the last field.