Game and
puzzle sites
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Franjos is an excellent small game company in Germany. The founder and proprietor is Franz-Josef Herbst. They have intelligent strategy games, mostly on finely tooled leather gameboards. The site is in German, copiously illustrated. Need translation? Click on this Babelfish.
Free Puzzles is Jimmie Dean's extensive website of puzzles. He has over 210 posted, with over a thousand collected so far. They include puzzles on math, geometry, logic, weights/volume, moves, word puzzles and a miscellaneous collection. Most of the math solutions are available. Jimmie's motto is, "Increase your IQ by playing puzzles." Many of his puzzles do look like questions from IQ and SAT tests.
Christian Freeling's website, MindSports, has got to be one of the slickest, jazziest, wittiest sites we've come across, one of the pioneers in online interactivity having to do with games. All in English though based in The Netherlands, it's packed with games, puzzles, chess variants, new games created by Christian, all good stuff you can download or play online. Web designer par excellence is Ed van Zon.
Games Play UK.com, based in Britain, is Keith Wilkinson's company that helps inventors find manufacturers and will give a free, forthright appraisal of the potential of your idea. They serve as agents to try to place the idea with a manufacturer, and, if needed, will even build the prototype at inventor's cost.Eric Harshbarger's website has a growing collection of pentomino articles and a dazzling portfolio of Lego sculptures. One of his pentomino questions won the Gamepuzzles Annual Pentomino Excellence award for best new pentomino problem proposed during calendar year 2004.
Harvey Heinz has a great website on magic squares, magic stars, magic cubes, and all sorts of number patterns, such as knight's tours. He gives their history and dazzling examples of solutions. It's awesome to realize how far back these ideas go. Those ancients had some smarts.
Hexboard provides both very beautiful Hex gameboards and opportunities for online play. The boards are laser-engraved and meant to be pieces of art. Each board is uniquely numbered and can be registered. Tony VanderValk of the Netherlands offers them as tribute to this now-classic connection game concept, a cousin to our own Game of Y and *Star.
HipSoft has the coolest downloadable computer games—"family fun for everyone"—that are also educational on three counts: word games, spatial puzzles, general knowledge ("trivia" but not trivial). HipSoft won our Gamepuzzles Annual Pentomino Excellence award in 2005 for Puzzle Express. Bryan Bouwman, Brian Goble and Garrett Price are the creative minds behind this most worthwhile enterprise. Check out their whole line-up. Try the games for free, buy them at very reasonable prices.Hop's Links — It's the strangest thing: the publisher of the Ajo Copper News, a very small weekly newspaper originally about copper mining in Ajo, Arizona, has a great fondness for Escher and all matters geometric. Hollister David has two websites — see also Hop's Page — for a great collection of links to all the best resources on tessellations, fractals, Fibonacci numbers, polyhedra, math and art, and asteroids. Out yonder in southern Arizona is one of the hottest outposts of the math, art and puzzle world.
Dave Huffman has created a beautiful game, Osiron, with a unique way of moving by exchanging places with the other player's pieces — and Dave makes them in a gorgeous pottery form, veritable art gallery ceramics. Take a look, read his interesting philosophy, and maybe even order a set.Glenn Iba is a much-published and honored scholar on artificial intelligence, machine learning, mathematics and computer science. He has a special interest in puzzles and games. Play his Grand Tour Path Puzzles, in square and hex formats. Connect dots to form a single closed path that visits every dot exactly once. Some permanent connectors are in place to make each solution unique. Easy to play—just click between dots to add or remove a link. Many levels of challenge; visit often and work your way up. Great fun and stimulation for your brain. Glenn has also contributed the lovely Hexmate challenges for our Hexdominoes set.
Jaap's Puzzle Page specializes in mechanical puzzles, primarily sequential movement types. Jaap Scherphuis, who is a collector in his own right, has included a wealth of links to all kinds of puzzle sites and descriptions and solutions. He's based in the Netherlands, a major center of Cube lovers.JDB Games is the brainchild of J. David Barnhart, dedicated to developing and selling a new generation of multi-dimensional, abstract strategy boardgames. The innovative games they show range in price, construction, and complexity, from a colorful cloth board design you can wear as a scarf ("GRYB") to finely crafted space-age sculptures that play in 3-D ("Time Vectors" and "Crystal Draughts"). Fascinating. Also read their excellent essay on the educational benefits of such games.
Jogos Antigos is an elegant and intelligent Brazilian site, all in Portuguese, about games old and new worldwide. Mauro Celso Mendonça de Alvarenga is the creative spirit behind this work. Each game in his anthology is described in great detail, with its history and rules of play, and well illustrated. Here's a little fish that opens the Babel Fish translation service, should you want to avail yourself:
Michael Keller's Solitaire Laboratory is an authoritative site for FreeCell and other solitaires, with a wealth of research and background material. You can also buy original game software for Windows that Michael has written, available on diskette or by email.
Scott Kim, puzzle master, designs visual thinking puzzles for the web and print, with software, books, toys, a newsletter, articles and reviews. Scott is also famous for his "inversion" writing that reads the same right-side-up and backwards, like his name icon here.
LiveCube is state-of-the-art Flash design (you need a good plug-in and preferably a fast connection) that's a treat for the eye. 3-D puzzle pieces move and rotate through space to assemble in many solutions. The site was created by Sywan-Yue Shih, of TBS, Inc. They also sell modular cubes that plug together to build into countless puzzle shapes. See their animated slide shows.
Sam Loyd (1841-1911) was American's most prolific and inventive creator of puzzles, and now there is a brilliantly designed website dedicated to his legacy. See his original designs to exercise your brain.Mathematical Games and Recreations is part of an extensive online archive of the history of mathematics, maintained by John J. O'Connor, Ph.D., of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and by Edmund Robinson. It gives highlights of mathematicians and their games, from thousands of years ago to the Rubik's Cube. A few inaccuracies hang on. A selective bibliography expands the lore.
Mathematics HQ is a huge reference library, a directory of sites related to mathematics in all its forms. From A Maths Dictionary For Kids to World Of Mathematics, it lists sources of everything from books, games, lessons to tutors, software and more.Mathpuzzle.com is Ed Pegg Jr.'s website of fascinating and beautiful mathematical puzzles, replete with links to other interesting sites, contests, discoveries, on-going research, and news about other math and puzzle people. Ed is also a consultant on the popular NUMB3RS TV program.
Maze Zing® Mazes is Jeff Montanye's collection of amazing mazes from photographs. He creates complex layouts using ordinary objects, like paperclips, alphabet blocks, berries, pebbles, even ants. All become elements of witty art. His website has a book you can buy and samples you can try, plus a maze-of-the-month. An entrepreneur since the age of 8, Jeff is one amazing guy. He even hiked 1100 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Read his bio.
Uwe Meffert has built a beautiful website as a world resource for puzzles. He's the inventor of the Pyraminx and many other well-known sequential movement puzzles. Meffert's was also a sponsor of the Mind Sports Olympiad for the year 2000. His site has a large number of links to other interesting puzzle-related sites, and you can buy his puzzles online. He also links to a site sharing knowledge for the betterment of humanity. Very interesting.
Leonid Mochalov is a prolific Russian puzzle creator with over 50 mechanical puzzles to his credit, plus a large variety of brainteasers, including labyrinths, mazes, dominoes, rebuses, cut-up puzzles and more, shown on his site. Generously he also provides solutions. His puzzles have been popular in Russia for decades, and now all over the world. Most of his site is in English as well. You can't buy his puzzles there, just enjoy viewing them and trying to solve them. When Leonid is not puzzling, he's fishing.
David Parlett is a legendary British author, game inventor, translator, historian and consultant. His best-known game is Hare & Tortoise, but check out all his others. What blew us away is that David also translated, from the Latin and Old German, many of the texts Carl Orff had used in Carmina Burana (one of our own long-time favorite pieces of music). Wow! David's bright, friendly website gives you glimpses of such fascinating facets of this man, besides the non-stop fun of his games universe. Plan to spend a few days there and return often.
PathPix is an amazing puzzle site created by Kris Pixton, a very talented artist, potter, software pioneer and thinker, and a fellow exhibitor of Kate's in many arts and crafts shows. Kris has developed hundreds of clever picture puzzles you solve by using logical deduction to draw colorpaths on a grid. All the while, serene classical music plays. When completed, a pixel-patterned picture becomes visible, with a literary quotation to the theme. We're hooked! The free download demo version contains 25 beautiful puzzles to get you started. Sizes and difficulty levels vary. And you can order hundreds more for a very gentle price. Also check out the rest of Kris's exquisitely designed website, Kris Pixton Pottery, showing her wonderful art works.PeterPuzzle is Peter Grabarchuk's beautifully done personal and professional website. Full of elegant and smart puzzles Peter has designed, for both hands-on and electronic play, the site shows his talent in website design as well. Peter is a member of the internationally renowned puzzling family Grabarchuk, with father Serhiy and brother Serhiy Jr. (their sites are linked elsewhere in our resources pages). Visit and hang out in the inviting activities Peter presents, and play his collection of wonderful brainteasers.
The Wade Philpott collection is maintained by the University of Calgary's library as part of its recreational mathematics section. These are the personal papers of the late Wade Philpott, one of the pioneers in recreational mathematics in the 20th century, containing his original manuscripts on the findings of decades of research. The library has done an efficient job in identifying and cataloguing a wide range of topics. Wade's major contributions were in extended research on MacMahon Squares and Triangles (published by Kadon Enterprises, Inc., in the instruction books for Multimatch I and Multimatch III), exhaustive research on domino puzzles, polyominoes and other polyforms, and the peg solitaires on a 6x6 grid (also published by Kadon in the game set Leap and included in Oxford University's compendium on The Ins and Outs of Peg Solitaire). Philpott was also a pioneer in developing search programs for computer-derived puzzle solutions.
The Poly Page, Andrew Clarke's website, is intended to become the most authoritative source of reference material on the history, solutions and challenges of polyform puzzles, by the master himself. Andrew is world-famous for having found some of the most beautiful, extraordinary solutions to the largest polyominoes, polyhexes, polyiamonds and more. His site also collects the findings of other top polyformists. He lives in Australia.
Polyform Puzzler is David Goodger's site for solving any polyform puzzle, with an overview of the best-known types and a solver program you can download as freeware. If you know geekspeak, you'll be right at home. For others, the beautiful graphics of the solutions shown are a delight.
Frank Potts is a puzzle fan, collector, and purveyor of 18 different categories of mechanical puzzles on his well-organized, easy-to-navigate "Potty Puzzles" website. And he ranges over every other kind of puzzle, with links to an amazing world of varieties, and some you can even play right on his website. Frank is based in England and accepts PayPal. Visit him (online, that is) and enjoy yourself.PuzzleBeast is James Stephens' cool collection of computer-generated puzzles you can play right there. Sliding block, rolling cube, maze puzzles of all kinds, and jumping puzzles. Try his "Fried Okra Perplexity"; it comes with a recipe.
Puzzle It is the ever-evolving website of Dr. Florian Radut, and you can read it in either Romanian or English. Play interactive puzzles, such as our Iamond Hex in a gentler, 9-piece challenge called Hexa. Many of Florian's own clever puzzle inventions are shown, as well as links to other puzzle sites and contests.Puzzle Master in Canada has a large and unique collection of wire and wood brain teasers, including puzzle boxes, puzzle rings, and books. They also carry specialty jigsaws and chess sets, and have online solutions of many puzzles. Owner and puzzle collector Allan Stein started out making and selling his puzzles at craft shows, too.
The Puzzle Museum is home to the world's finest collection of Mechanical Puzzles, also known as "Chinese Puzzles", "Puzzle Objects", "Real Puzzles", and "Practical Puzzles" from 320 BC to tomorrow's prototypes. The site is an ever-growing display of the world-class puzzle collection of James Dalgety, curator, and the late Edward Hordern. Learn about puzzle classifications, tour the hands-on exhibits, visit the Swap&Shop puzzle store, admire puzzle art, and see over 4500 puzzles currently on display. Just for fun, lose yourself by starting on the "Random" link—you'll never know where it will take you! There's also a links page to designers and sellers.
Puzzle University is a lively website with online puzzles, contests and features that simulate a university. Win weekly prizes, contribute puzzles, join a chatroom. Directed by Dr. Amy Galitzer.
Puzzle World is the Internet's most extensive mechanical puzzle site, managed by John Rausch, who personally knows just about everyone in the world of puzzles. The site includes links to many collectors, puzzle designers and sources, and is laid out beautifully and intelligently.
Puzzles.com is an outreach of ThinkFun, Inc. (formerly Binary Arts) and is now in the capable and creative hands of Serhiy Grabarchuk, Jr. It has six major sectors: Puzzles in Education, PuzzleClub, PlayGround, Projects, Puzzle Links and Puzzle Help. There are news, discussions, puzzles from and for the Club's members; original puzzles, illusions, tricks, and scientific toys; and a place to buy puzzles and diversions. Serhiy's vision is to develop this site as a creative, educational environment with both original content and links to other great puzzle sites on the Internet.
