Some puzzles you finish. Others finish you. The good ones do a sneaky thing — they teach you the rules in about ten seconds, then spend the next hour proving you didn't really understand them. That gap, between "oh this is simple" and "wait how do I get out of this," is the whole game.
"Puzzle" is a wide word, though. A merge game and a nonogram ask for completely different kinds of attention, and the one you'll get lost in depends on which kind you're in the mood for. So this page sorts every puzzle on the site by type — seven families, what each one is really asking of you, the games we host in it, and a link to the deeper guide where we've written one. All free, all in the browser, all instant.
Merge and number puzzles
The rule is one line long: put two identical things together and they become one bigger thing. The puzzle is space, because every merge you don't make is a tile still sitting on the board, and the board is small. The lineage runs from Threes and 1024 to Gabriele Cirulli's 2048 in 2014, and from there to the fruit-dropping craze that Japan's Suika Game set off.
2048 is the one almost everyone has lost a bus ride to. Slide tiles, merge matching numbers, keep your biggest tile pinned in a corner and pray. It looks like math. It's really about not panicking when the board fills up. Merge Melons is the fruit version: drop cherries into a jar, watch two of a kind fuse into something bigger, and keep the pile below the line while you chase one enormous melon — physics replaces the grid, so a careless drop rolls somewhere you didn't want it. Tens! merges by arithmetic instead: drag across touching tiles until they add up to exactly ten and let the cascade do the rest. If 2048 is your one, the games like 2048 guide walks the whole merge family, from its closest cousins to the point where merging turns into matching.
Tile and block fitting
Here the pieces are given to you and the question is where they go. Fill a complete line and it clears; leave a gap and it haunts you. It's the family the 1984 falling-block puzzle founded, and it has two modern branches: pieces that fall on a clock, and pieces you place at your own pace, where the only pressure is running out of room.
Tile Hive drops you onto a honeycomb where lines clear in three directions instead of two — so the way you "see" the board has to change, and a piece that looks harmless can finish a row you never meant to set up. Wood Block Sudoku is the square-grid cousin: a 9x9 board that clears rows, columns and 3x3 boxes, no timer, no luck, just a board that slowly runs out of room. Block Drop is the falling-blocks rhythm you already know in your fingers, rebuilt with a ghost-piece preview so you can plan the landing. The hex board has its own logic, and the Tile Hive strategy guide covers it: why you scan all three directions before every drop, which pieces to place early, where to keep a pocket of empty cells, and how combos beat single lines.
Logic and deduction
Nothing is hidden from you except the answer, and every clue is honest. These are the puzzles where a careful player never has to guess — the numbers on a Minesweeper board, the givens in a Sudoku grid and the clues along a nonogram's edge all determine what goes where. The pleasure is the moment a single cell forces three more.
Minesweeper is still undefeated after thirty years. Numbers tell you how many mines hide nearby; the rest is nerve and a bit of logic. Flag wrong once and the whole board goes up. Sudoku descends from Howard Garns' 1979 "Number Place" and became the world's puzzle after Japan's Nikoli took it up in the 1980s — nine rows, nine columns, nine boxes, one of each digit in each. Picross Logic is a nonogram, the picture-logic puzzle invented in Japan in the late 1980s: read the run lengths along each row and column, fill the cells they force, and an image appears. Lights Out revives a 1995 handheld — every tap toggles a cell and its four neighbours, and you're trying to switch all twenty-five off. For the two big ones we've written proper guides: Minesweeper's number patterns and when a guess is genuinely forced, and how to play Sudoku online, from scanning and pencil marks to the naked pairs that crack hard grids.
Word puzzles
Same deduction instinct, different raw material — your vocabulary is the search space. Word puzzles reward the person who can hold a pattern in their head, something-A-something-E-R, and run through the words that fit it.
Word Guess is the daily-word formula everyone learned in 2022: six tries at a hidden five-letter word, tiles flipping green, yellow and grey to tell you what you've got. Word Search is the older, gentler form — eight to twelve themed words hidden in a letter grid, running in any direction, forwards or backwards, found by dragging a straight line through them. If you've got the daily-word habit, games like Wordle lists every word game we host and what each one changes about the formula.
Tile matching (mahjong solitaire)
Pairs of identical tiles clear, and the only question is which pairs are legal. In the stacked "turtle" layout a tile is free only when nothing rests on top of it and one of its long sides is open, so the whole game is what each match unblocks. It isn't the four-player table game at all — it's a single-player puzzle that borrowed the tile set in the 1980s, when Brodie Lockard's Shanghai put it on home computers.
Mahjong Solitaire is the full 144-tile turtle with hint, undo and a shuffle that keeps every deal winnable. Mahjong Match is the cleanest version of the same rule — traditional layouts, nothing in the way. Mahjong Connect borrows the tiles but not the pile: everything lies flat and face-up, and a pair only clears if a free lane joins the two — a path through empty cells that turns at most twice. The lane is allowed to leave the board and slip around the outside, so clear the border early and the middle unpicks itself. Every variant we host, sorted into those families, lives on the mahjong page.
Card puzzles (solitaire)
Solitaire is a puzzle wearing a deck of cards. There's a shuffle in it, which is why not every Klondike deal can be won, but within a deal the moves are yours: which column to dig into, when to hold a card back, when an empty column is worth more than the tidy merge in front of you.
Solitaire is Klondike — seven columns, four foundations, the one that shipped on every office PC for a generation. FreeCell is the thinker's version: every card face-up from the start, four free cells to park cards in, and almost every deal solvable, so a loss is a wrong move rather than bad luck. Spider Solitaire is the long one — two decks, eight columns, full King-to-Ace runs in a single suit before anything leaves the table. The whole family, with the rules of each, is on the solitaire page.
Sliding and sorting
The oldest family here. Things are in the wrong place, you can only move them in constrained ways, and the puzzle is the order you do it in. The 15-puzzle was a craze in the 1880s; Sokoban put crate-pushing on Japanese home computers in 1982; Rush Hour turned Klotski-style sliding blocks into a car park in the 1990s.
Water Sort Puzzle is the modern one — pour coloured liquid between tubes until each holds a single colour. Weirdly calming, right up until you realise you've boxed yourself in with two moves left. Every level here is checked to be solvable, so when you're stuck, it's on you, not the game. Slide Puzzle is the 15-puzzle itself, on 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 boards, and the trick is solving it row by row rather than tile by tile. Traffic Escape is the Rush Hour idea: the red car is boxed in, slide the others out of the way, and clear a lane to the exit in as few moves as you can. And Box Pusher is Sokoban — nudge every crate onto its target, remembering that a crate pushed into a corner is a crate you will never move again.
The ones that don't fit a box
A few puzzles here bend the genre and we like them too much to leave out. One Line Draw asks you to trace every line of a shape in a single unbroken stroke — sounds trivial, try it on level twenty. Scribble Wheels hands you a pencil and a gap: draw a road, hit play, and a little car drives whatever you scribbled. Lambe Haath turns you into a thief with a rubber arm; stretch it past saws and lasers to grab the loot. Snake Solver is a logic version of snake where you plan the whole route before you move, and Orb Breaker mixes brick-breaking with number puzzles — aim, bounce, break the wall before it reaches you.
Want the full set? The puzzle category has every one of these in a single grid.
So which do you start with?
If you've got five minutes, 2048. If you want to switch your brain off, Water Sort. If you want it fully on, Minesweeper or a hard Sudoku. If you'd rather it stayed on while your hands do something, mahjong or FreeCell. And if you want the honest version of what any of these do for your head, our pick of brain games that make you think says what each one trains — and what the evidence says it doesn't.