The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!

It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!

Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!

Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)

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Ah, it crept up on me, so let me remind everyone that Roguelike Celebration begins today, although until tomorrow it just means they’re opening their social space for awhile. Nicole Carpenter at Polygon wrote a short piece about this year’s conference.

There is an admittance fee, but if you can’t afford it you can also get a free pass! Please consider paying them if you are able though, they do a lot of work every year in putting it together.

Here is the official schedule (linked), below is it presented just as a list of talks, with sparkle emojis around the things that personally enthuse me. Just because!

Times given are US Pacific/Eastern. If you think the short times between starts are indicative of short talks, most of them aren’t that short, they have two tracks going on beside each other:

SATURDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Arron A. Reed, Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in the First Decade of Text Games

10:00 AM/ 1 PM: Nic Tringali, Abstract Space Exploration in The Banished Vault

10:30 AM/ 1:30 PM: Linas Gabrielaitis, Fictions of Infinity in Geological Finitudes

10:45 AM/1:45 PM: Ludipe, Exploring Pacifist Roguelikes

11:30 AM/2:30 PM: Florence Smith Nicholls, Another Stupid Date: Love Island as a Roguelike

11:45 AM/2:45 PM Kes, Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, Provenance, and You

Noon/3 PM: Mike Cook, Generating Procedures: Rule and System Generation for Roguelikes

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Scott Burger, The Data Science of Roguelikes

2 PM/5 PM: Nat Alison, In Defense of Hand-Crafted Sudoku

3 PM/6 PM: Eric Billingsley, Scoped-down design: Making a Tiny Roguelike

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Elliot Trinidad, Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the Blaseball Name Generator

4:30 PM/7:30 PM: Paul Hembree, Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for Music Generation

5 PM/8 PM: Jurie Horneman, Why Dynamic Content Selection Is Hard

SUNDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Mark Johnson, Generating Riddles for a Generated World

10 AM/1 PM: Jesse Collet & Keni, Fireside Chat About the Development of NetHack

10:30 AM/1:30 PM: Leigh Alexander, McMansions of Hell: Roguelikes and Reality TV

1 PM/4 PM: Ray, Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating Fan Reinterpretation Through Caves of Qud’s Modular Data Files

1:15 PM/4:15 PM: Crashtroid, Preventing Ear Fatigue with Roguelike Music

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Everest Pipkin, The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and the Games That Are Played There

2 PM/5 PM: Jeff Olson, Alphaman: Developing and Releasing a Post-Apocalyptic Roguelike Game in the DOS Days When Computers Were Slow, Memory Was Scarce, and No One Had Ever Heard of Object-Oriented Code

3 PM/6 PM: Dustin Freeman, Live Action Roguelike

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Jonathan Lessard, A Simulation with a View

3:45 PM/6:45 PM: Tom Francis, Generating Boring Levels for Fresh Experiences in Heat Signature

4 PM/7 PM: Patrick Kemp, Design Tooling at Spry Fox

5 PM/8 PM: Stav Hinenzon, A Messy Approach to Dynamic Narrative in Sunshine Shuffle

5:15 PM/8:15 PM: Josh Galecki, Procedurally Generating Puzzles

5:30 PM/8:30 PM: Jasper Cole, Backpack Hero – Player Upgrades and Progression

6 PM/9 PM: Brianna McHorse & Chris Foster, Fusing AI with Game Design: Let the Chaos In

rodneylives

I got a treat for you people today, a genuine treasure of the internet, a collection of forty computer-generated puzzles of wide-ranging types, from Sudoku (called “Solo” because of trademarks) to Minesweeper. And they’re not only all open source and free, they’re free for many platforms. Not all the puzzles are yet available for all platforms, but it’s continually being worked on, with new puzzles added from time to time. It has been for nineteen years; when it got started it only had five puzzle types. It’s one of the best things out there, and I’m amazed it’s not better known generally.

I can’t overstate what a wonder this collection is. All the puzzles are their own executable, if you don’t just play them on the web anyway. Each one of these puzzles offers many hours of happy puzzling. My own favorites are Loopy, Slant, Bridges, Dominosa, Galaxies, Net and Untangle. Most of the puzzles are of a type that should be familiar to fans of the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli, but they’re all randomly generated, and playable on multiple difficulty levels.

If the name Simon Tatham sounds familiar, he’s the guy who also created and maintains the popular networking tool PuTTY.

Here’s the links, all of these are free:

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection main site, which has implementations for Java, Javascript and Windows

Here’s some other HTML implementations

For Android on the Play Store

For iOS on the Apple App Store

On the Windows Store

In the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories (and it should be available in your own distribution’s repository, too)

Flathub

And here it is for Windows again, but distributed through Chocolatey

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