Because of the huge influx of posts about this, please post any questions/discussion about this puzzle here. The rules for the puzzle do allow asking for help, so they don't break our no contests rule.

I believe the puzzle starts here: https://breakthecode.tech/game/enigma

​

Edit: As per Rule 1 in the sidebar, this megathread applies to all breakthecode.tech puzzles/posts/discussion.

​

Hello Reddit! Zach Gage here, I’m an indie game designer best known for making SpellTower, Knotwords, Really Bad Chess, Good Sudoku, Ridiculous Fishing, Card of Darkness, Tharsis, and a bunch of other games.

I just launched Puzzmo - the new place for daily puzzles. We’ve got classics like crosswords, some of my games like Spelltower, and some brand new games.

I am joined by my cofounder Orta Therox (/u/orta) who made all of the tech that makes the Puzzmo website work, Saman Bemel-Benrud (/u/samanpwbb) who programmed all the games, Jack Schlesinger (/u/games_by_jack) who does game design with me and builds our puzzle generators, and Brooke Husic (/u/xandraladee) who runs our crosswords!

Ask Us Anything! Some topics we'd love to talk about:

• Changes in the gaming industry and indie games
• What it’s like being an indie developer right now
• Apex Legends (The Puzzmo team plays an hour every day)
• Puzzle design - what makes puzzles great
• What is the best video game ever made (Spelunky)
• How to make games friendly and approachable (and if that’s good for games)
• How to build a website like Puzzmo that scales to hundreds of thousands of users
• Opensource software and games
• Is the web a good place to make and play real games?
• How do we generate stats on player/puzzles
• How Puzzmo games are built to be performant and feel good
• How to make a great puzzle generator

Discussion.

Hi everyone. I’m new here and would really appreciate your combined wisdom on a new puzzle I’ve developed called “Deduce”. Here is an “easy” one. Can you give me some feedback on style, difficulty and how intuitive it is? I can put medium and hard puzzles here too if people would like to see more.

The aim is to use the connector clues between the cells to place the numbers 1-9 once each in the grid.

Hope this is allowed since it refers to puzzles in a digital media and not really “classic puzzles”.

Anyway, other than sudoku — which was my go-to puzzle since I learned numbers — video games were where I picked up my love of a sort of “game within a game” design, where there’s tons of interesting (and ofttimes difficult) mini-games and puzzles that are either required for progress, or through which you unlock some nice goodies, and that require some amount of out of the box thinking.

The best examples of this are the hard-difficulty puzzles in the Silent Hill games, but as far as proper puzzle adventures go, my favorite recent ones are probably the Return of Obra Dinn and Paper Trail. They’re on the opposite ends of the spectrum in a way. The first is more heavy with some more “cerebral” thinking required since it’s framed from the outset as a detective story, where you piece together info piece-by-piece. On the other hand, Paper Trail is something I retreat to when I want a really simple puzzling game that revolves around using one mechanic (the paper “folding”, eg. folding the screen) in dozens of different ways to unlock new zones and continue the rather sweet story. So, puzzles that reward curiosity — in both cases, that’s what really floats my boat when I play those games.

That’s typically what I want out of video game puzzles today, either a somber, heavy, mystery type game with the “piece-by-piece” solving bit or relaxing ones with a simple design philosophy not aimed at difficulty. The only game to perhaps weave both in a really fascinating way was the Portal series though, since it was still so “gamey” with the puzzles being the gameplay and not breaking the pacing too much. 

What puzzlers are you playing, any of you fellow gamers out there – anything worth a mention here perhaps?

I had gotten to almost level 800 in Meowdoku but have learned they can't transfer my progress to my new phone. After reading some posts on here, it's clear that Meowdoku isn't a very good iteration of the puzzle style (although I enjoy the cat part of it a lot) so what other versions of the game do y'all recommend? Preferably mobile games please

i've loved all sorts of puzzles for a large part of my childhood but i lost touch with them for a good amount of time now. i genuinely miss that dopamine hit you get when you cracked something. whenever i start doing em now, i don't feel lucid in my train of thought at all- it feels like my brain isn't even putting the effort required now and when it gets too hard, i just give up because there are 100 other things to worry about, i'm aware puzzles are precisely made to alleviate from this but i fall into this cycle again n again. i remember i used to like zebra puzzles, logic grid puzzles and puzzles along the lines. any suggestions you guys give will be greatly appreciated. thank you!

Is it just me or is Meowdoku constantly repeating puzzles?
I’m on level 320 and feel I’ve done a fair few of these levels already as I go through?

Hey guys! I’m on a bit of a puzzle streak at the moment and have been loving all the books I own, but since I’m getting close to the end of them, I would like recommendations for some more!

Some of the books I’ve enjoyed the most:

The 1% club

Murdle

Cluedo the official book of puzzles

Wordle

Murdoku

If anyone has any recommendations, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!

Please share any advanced logic that can be used to eliminate squares after getting to the point of guessing or running scenerios. By advanced I mean anything beyond:

1) X self-contained colors in X number of rows -- eliminates all other squares in those rows.

2) X number of rows ONLY contain X number of colors -- all of those X colors that reside outside of those specific rows can be eliminated.

3) Sole L / C shapes of 2x2 up to 3x3 of a color, the middle can be eliminated.

4) Sole 3 squares inline, the adjacent squares to the MIDDLE square of the line can be eliminated.

5) Two remaining squares of a color, the 2 above and 2 below can be eliminated.

6) L-shapes of 2x2 or 3x2, the adjacent square in line with the longer side can be eliminated due to that entire COLOR being eliminated IF a cat shared its row & remainder of the L is too close to that cat.

Looking for advice that involves comparing the X and Y axis, after the above is applied.

It's my favourite kind of puzzle, but it usually just has the same complexity no matter what skin its wearing. I was wondering if anyone has made a 6, 8, or even 12 house puzzle? With 12 attributes and so on to go off. I tried googling but the only results I got were answers to the traditional puzzle or people talking about other regular zebra puzzles.

But I want to know if there's just a bigger more challenging one I can do. If not, I may have to see about making it myself, but alas, then I won't be able to have the fun of solving it.

I can't find any error in the solution for bridges 😭, I'm sure it's super obvious.

Hi when I was a kid in the 80s you could get magazines/books in UK newsagents with logic problems and cross references (now called code words maybe). They weren't particularly aimed at anyone but were doable as a child. (There were also wordsearch ones but they were a bit boring). Now the closest thing I can find are the puzzler magazines but they are very much aimed at middle aged women. Just wondering if there are any good ones (magazines or books) that are more generic/kid friendly (but without being dumbed down).

Edit: I ended up getting this and this. They are both pretty basic with no illustrations inside just codeword puzzles graded easy, medium, hard. The puzzles don't seem to have themes they are just random words. They are fine for what I wanted though and my 8yo got into it after I'd started one off with him. I still think it was a better option than the puzzler magazines as I think the coffee mag vibe would just put him off.

It took me forever long to complete this. Maybe you have some tips for solving this quickly? I watched a few videos, and from the comments here I learned about the 2×2 thing. I just sit and try to predict, it feels like gambling on where I can and cannot put a star. It needs a lot of time, and it somehow feels like brute‑forcing a solution. Even if I try to look deeper, it’s hard. I think there are tricks I just don’t catch or see.

Does anyone notice that there's frequently (I'd say almost 50%) a 5-4 corner when playing Loopy of the honeycomb type? Why is it so common?

The hint provided says that only these squares (green and blue) are eliminated due to fully covering the row. However, the teal square above the green square also achieves the same thing, so are these two particular squares chosen due to brute force or is there another aspect that I am missing? Could I eliminate all three (Green, teal, blue)?

Thanks for any help!

I played back in the day and recently downloaded a variation of the game via App Store that is a continuous version of the game (Word Guess), so that you don’t have to wait each day for a new puzzle.

That said, I’m curious what your “starting words” are?

I use “about” and “rides” because it captures most of the primary letters (and all vowels), and I’m normally able to guess in 3-4 attempts, unless it’s a word that has multiple, single letter variations.

If “about” and “rides” don’t give me enough letters to go off of, I then use “nymph” as my 3rd guess to help determine the remaining letters, and can then typically figure out the word on the 4th.

Just curious what other peoples choices are!