My ideal games look something like Siemens PLM NX or something, and less like a one-armed bandit in Vegas.
As such, you could not build a natural, normal transport system - for example, a central ring road or subway, with routes radiating outwards off of the ring. The only way to build a viable city was to understand how the transport sim worked, and then build a transport layout to fit how it worked.
The SimCity series was less about building a city than it was about managing traffic.
SimTower was less about property management, and more about elevator management.
Factorio is less about building a factory, as it is about resource routing. Or, later, programming trains. Or later, god knows what, I haven't gotten that far.
Baldur's Gate III is less about defeating the BBEG through RPG mechanics, and more about choosing who to romance (Karlach).
FWIW, you can turn them off. I always play with them disabled. Just not what I'm interested in. You might enjoy that, too.
I also enjoyed shapez, but it's no comparison to the depth of Factorio, especially with mods.
The other one I used to play a lot is Mamono Sweeper [1] One summer in undergrad when I was supposed to be doing graph theory research, instead I got really, really, really good at basic arithmetic by playing this game for 5+ hours a day. This is how I learned that I had no interest in math grad school and I now work as a developer in a video game-adjacent space.
Recently I made an online Pentominoes puzzle [2] and I've played it a lot also.
If anyone knows a good source of free Paint by Numbers puzzles I would love to hear about it!
[0] https://www.conceptispuzzles.com/
I found it by searching for the much more common name "picross".
A lot of the time solving loopy involves noticing re-usable patterns. But how do you know a possible pattern is re-usable? Well, you can prove it, such as with notions from graph theory.
The construction vs discovery aspect could be approached in a couple of ways. On the one hand, the loop that you are "discovering" is really only induced by the underlying solutions which the computer has already "constructed." On the other hand, the computer only created the hidden solution using mathematics which was discovered.
And on the other other hand, the mathematics which we "discover" is arguably induced by the ZFC etc axioms which we have constructed because of their ability to model consistent reasoning. Other sets of axioms, lacking the flexibility or consistency which we expect from our mathematical models, were discarded, yet would induce different mathematical systems capable of discovery.
And the nesting of construction and discovery into each other could continue even deeper ...
Other puzzles I like in this collection that have such provable patterns are Pearl, Slant, Tents, Undead and Unruly. And, of course, Mines.
This is an excellent collection, that should come with every and any OS as a standard installation.
Thank you, Simon!
https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/
Previous discussion on HackerNews:
Even if you're allowed to make a guess on an empty board (classic Minesweeper will wait to generate the board until you do, so that your first guess is never a mine), most games end in a 50/50 chance.
I've sometimes thought of adding a puzzle to this collection but I would actually rather refactor everything to remove that wart. It would involve turning Minesweeper into a game with a foyer, but probably worth doing?
Also, I thought the modern Windows version of minesweeper did the same first-click-is-free logic?
Any recommendation for an iOS app with this many curated puzzles, possibly without annoying ads or in-app purchases?
They're all about on-par with the level of exciting-ness of Minesweeper and Sudoku. Take that as you wish.
Today, with reliable Internet on my phone, I could instead scroll Fediverse or something, but I figure blazing through puzzles using rules I've learned is more meditative.
I find a custom-sized Pearl board so that it fills as much of my phone screen as possible without getting teeny is just the right length to fill a minute or two. I wanted to play even bigger boards on my tablet, but it seems the puzzle generation algorithm is exponential and asking for a too-big board will crash the app.
Jason Rohrer - https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
Do distros package these? They should!
Puzz.link also includes a database of links to puzzles people are playing.
For people looking to feel old fashioned, printing out some random puzzles on puzz.link and doing them on pen and paper is sometimes satisfying
[0]: http://pzv.jp/ PUZ-PRE [1]: https://puzz.link/ puzz.link
I'm a bit disappointed though that the original desktop version doesn't really play nicely on touchscreens.
