Free puzzle games: twenty sudokus, a minesweeper, and why I build them

The second thing I had open on the table in San Francisco was not a tool. It was a sudoku with animals in it.

awa.games is a set of free puzzle games that run in the browser: sudoku, killer sudoku, nonogram, minesweeper, the Tower of Hanoi and the sliding puzzle, each with hints and a solver. Then twenty picture sudokus, where the digits are animals, dinosaurs, fruit, flowers, sea creatures, vehicles, vegetables, mushrooms, birds, bugs, instruments, pastries, robots, the zodiac signs, Christmas, Valentine’s, sports gear, gym equipment and tools. And a letter sudoku, where one row spells a hidden word.

People in the room were at least as curious about this as about AwaCut, and not the people I expected.

Why free games, next to a paid tool

The honest answer is that I like making them. The useful answer has three parts.

The demand is enormous and it is not going anywhere. Google’s own Keyword Planner puts “sudoku” at about four million searches a month and “minesweeper” at about five million, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia alone. “Killer sudoku” and “nonogram” are around a hundred thousand each. These are games people have played for decades and will play for decades more. A page that does one of them well, free, with no app to install, has a long life.

The same rules apply as to the tool. Every puzzle on awa.games has a solver behind it, so a hint is never a guess and a minesweeper board never asks you to gamble on the first click. A board that cannot be solved by logic is a bug, not a feature. That is the same standard I hold AwaCut to: the output has to be right, every time, and the software has to tell you what it is doing. Building games is where I learned to care about that, because a player notices a wrong hint in a second.

The picture sudokus are the part nobody else bothers with. A 4×4 with four animals is a first sudoku for a child or for anyone who has never tried one. The 9×9 with nine dinosaurs is the real game with a different skin. The search volume for each of these is tiny, and that is the point: they are made for the people who find them, not for a keyword.

What a tool and a game have in common

From the outside, a desktop background remover and a browser sudoku have nothing to do with each other. From the inside they are the same practice:

1. Pick a job people already do, often.
2. Do it with no account, no upload, no waiting, and no trick.
3. Make the software explain itself: a hint that shows its reasoning, a cutout that shows its edge.
4. Keep it running for years.

That practice is what I was really showing in San Francisco. The tool and the games are two instances of it. The interest that day came for both, from different kinds of people, and I would rather you find out which by opening them than by my telling you.

If you want to see them

Open the games and play one. The animal sudoku on easy takes two minutes; the minesweeper on hard takes a lot longer, and it will never make you guess. Then open AwaCut and drop a folder in. Same maker, same rules.