Game and
puzzle sites
Page 1 of 3 (A-E)
Page 3 of 3 (Q-Z)
Jean-Louis Sigrist has an amazing and attractive website devoted to math, magic, education, geometry and puzzles, all in French but so generously illustrated that you probably won't need the words, or you can brush off your high-school French. Many puzzles and magic tricks are interactive online. Then there's his golf page.
Torsten Sillke has a wide-ranging website of recreational mathematics subjects and links, including an index of Martin Gardner's books. He also has a large page of tantalizing unsolved problems. Want to try some?
Smart Games is an amazing, delightful, superb enterprise with all original, brain-building logic games and puzzles, developed and made in Belgium. Clean, elegant styling in bright plastics, many award-winning designs. Each set comes with multiple challenges in ascending levels of difficulty, suitable for ages 6 to 99 (they say). Even the bright, cheerful packaging is thoughtfully designed for easy storage, with pocket, compact and table top editions. Solutions are included. We applaud that they also offer replacement parts for games they have not discontinued. We're sad to think any of those wonderful products should ever go out of print. In the meantime,you can get a membership for online play.
Spidron describes an amazing tiling with two kinds of triangles that can also fold into a solid figure and into a relief pattern of mountain and valley folds, and they can be bent to curve space. The Spidron system was discovered by Daniel Erdely of Hungary and first presented at the Twelfth International Conference on Crystal Growth in 1998. This webpage illustrates many of its surprising manifestations.SurfNetKids.com is a merry site full of entertaining and educational activities for kids. It's the brainchild of columnist Barbara Feldman and includes arts, crafts, music, games, lots of interactive games, languages, math, science, history, the calendar, word games, a blog, links, jokes, a journal, a book club, and many other topics, as well as sound advice. Yes, you can even solve Pentominoes rectangles here. And there is a large section on one of our favorite things, tessellations, and activities for creating your own. There are lots of ads and pop-ups around to pay for all the good free stuff.
Robert Stegmann is a serious collector of mechanical puzzles, and his richly illustrated website, "Robert's Puzzle Page," shows his collection and has links to many sources.
Terry Stickels is an author and speaker who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of improving one's mental flexibility and creative problem-solving skills...and making it fun. His books, calendars, card decks, newspaper columns and website are filled with fun and challenging puzzles that stretch the minds of even the best thinkers. His book of Frame Games came out in 2006, and the puzzles appear in daily newspapers. His 2010 Frame Games Calendar (shown at right, 2009 edition) is now available. You can order any of his books directly from Terry on his website. And try out his brilliant brainteasers while you're there. They'll get your brain working in fun new ways.
Tailten Games are the creation of Murray Heasman of Ireland, offering magnificent puzzles and games, including the Knotiverse of classical art and Celtic knotwork intricacy. Murray carefully selects the images, Celtic artwork from Irish artist Rachel Arbuckle, Architectural masterpieces from the famed photographer Achim Bednorz, Pre-Raphaelite paintings from the Tate Gallery and many others. His latest (as of 2021) wonderful creation is Nodus, a set of tiles that are segments of a Celtic knot pattern to join into many patterns.
Tessellations is Robert Fathauer's site for MathArtFun, with a wealth of educational puzzles and products, particularly for teachers. Robert is also a research professor and artist incorporating mathematics, such as fractals and tessellations, into his art, and is working in digital art. He has designed many of the puzzles his company sells. This is were math and aesthetics meet.
TilePuzzles.com is for sliding block puzzle lovers. Here's a collection of over 40 different sliding tile puzzles and games in various formats, from the traditional 15 puzzle of number squares to wood blocks, picture tiles, and trains, from an easy introductory puzzle to the hardest tile games imaginable. Collect medals in the Tile Championships, submit your score to the Hi Scores. Attractively designed, no ads, and it's free. Another one of their fun and challenging game sites is SpotTheDifference, 78 levels of sharpening your powers of observation.
UniPuzzle, subtitled "the mind resort," is one of several enthusiastic game and puzzle sites from the famous Grabarchuk family of puzzle designers. It's packed with news articles, featured puzzles, innovative game and puzzle concepts, reviews, archives, and always new challenges monthly. It's part playground, part magazine. Go have fun!
Aad van de Wetering's home page offers for free download several programs for solving polyform puzzles. He also shares his pleasure in a large variety of puzzles and games with interesting and illustrated descriptions...all in Dutch. Not to worry—you can enjoy the graphics, and the solving programs are easy to identify because key words are the same: polyominoes, polyiamonds, polyhexes.
William Waite, an American mathematician/musician/humorist, has a quaint and curious site of fun and fantasy surrounding puzzles and mysteries. Nemmelgeb Murr is a mythic land 3 trillion lightyears away and has inspired William to design geometric puzzles in boxes, lasercut wood tiling puzzles, music puzzles and "artifacts," several available for secure ordering on his site. Solve his maze puzzle and maybe win a prize.Martin Watson's eclectic British website is homey, personal, colorful, a whimsical combination of blog, diary, photo album, newsy miscellanies, sundry links, a collage of Martin's interests and doings, and a catalog of puzzles Martin collects and designs. Get a dose of British humor, literature and history while you're there.
Richard Whiting's jazzy website, full of flash and animation, is titled Puzzle Grail, the quest for the ultimate puzzle. It shows a nice sampling of Richard's collection by categories, and selected solutions to the really thorny ones. May need Flash to view some pages.
Wildwords is the brainchild of Peter Roizen. This crossword game goes beyond Scrabble® in having asterisk tiles that serve as wildcards for one or more letters. Peter has designed a great play-online version, with full directions. Two players anywhere in the world can get online and play each other in realtime. Also available for download.
Judy Wyckoff is a fascinating lady with interesting hobbies, like puzzles, photography and astronomy. Her website illustrates her large puzzle collection by major categories (she has many of Kadon's, too), and viewing her collection of painstakingly made photos of cosmic objects is like having your own Hubble telescope. She does all this against great odds. Treat yourself to many visits.
Livio Zucca has a marvelous website bursting with polyform puzzle ideas, sets, questions, and computer-generated solutions. Beautifully illustrated. Some arrangements have hundreds and even thousands of pieces. It took one heck of a programmer to derive these solutions. When Livio's earlier host folded, his wealth of materials was rescued and is preserved as Remembrance of Software Past on a mirror site at Iread.it. Most pages date from 2000 and 2001 and are still as fresh as the future. Another site to the rescue of this fine material is Colonel George Sicherman's Polyform Curiosities, where new research continues.
