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Our Online Puzzle Player

Resizing the Puzzle

In order to avoid solving confusion, the grid stays square at all times. In order to achieve this, the puzzle will scale with the width of your browser window, not the height. If you open your browser full screen on a wide monitor, this means the bottom of the grid may be cut off due to the resizing being based on the browser width. If this happens, please reduce the width of your browser window accordingly until you can clearly see all of the puzzle grid in your browser at your desired size.

Play Using a Keyboard

If you are playing using a keyboard, laptop or other device with a keyboard, then you can click the square of your choice with the mouse and it will turn yellow when active, no matter what colour background the square has.

You can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move around the grid, or shift to move forward one square at a time and shift+tab to move backwards one square at a time.

To shift between big and small numbers (explained in more detail below) you can press the spacebar to toggle between big and small numbers.

When you are playing Minesweeper Puzzles, you can press 'M' for 'Mine' to toggle a mine on and off in a square, and press 'X' to toggle marking a square as empty.

Play Using a Touchscreen device

If you are playing using a smartphone, tablet or other device without a keyboard, then you press the square you wish to work on with your finger, which will turn it yellow. You can then use the number pad displayed at the right of the screen to choose your desired number.

Entering Numbers into the Grid

When the puzzle loads, any given numbers will be shown in black. Numbers that you enter will be shown in blue to differentiate them, pencilmarks (small numbers) are in black. When entering numbers there are two options for most puzzle games: big and small. 'Big' is the default, use this when you know exactly which number a square must contain. 'Small' is the equivalent of pencilmarks: use this to narrow down the options for a given square. You can toggle by pressing space bar on the keyboard, or pressing the 'Big' or 'Small' button at the right of the screen as required.

Whether working with big or small numbers, if you press a number once it appears in the square, if you press the same number again, it removes it. You can press backspace on a keyboard to empty a square, or use the delete button at the right of the screen. The same is true with the pencilmarks (small numbers), for instance if you have currently placed 1 and 4 as options in a square, select it again and press 4 again to remove 4 as an option. All numbers toggle like this by pressing them repeatedly, whether in big numbers of small numbers mode.

If you want to start again, click the 'reset' button. You can use the 'check' button at any time to see if you are correct so far: any incorrectly placed squares will turn red (pencilmarks/small numbers are ignored for checking purposes). A message box will tell you how many squares are currently empty and/or incorrect as relevant, or confirm your solution is correct if you've got it right! The solver knows the solution to every puzzle that is played so if you like reassurance as you go along that you're along the right lines, clicking 'check' is the way to be sure you've not inadvertently made any mistakes.

If you realise you have made a mistake, you can press 'undo' repeatedly to take you back as many steps as you wish. This will remove your big and small numbers and any colour placements in reverse order.

Colouring Squares

You can also select a square and then click one of the six colours to change the background of that square to your chosen colour. Clicking the same colour again will return the square to its default colour. This can be useful in certain puzzles such as sandwich sudoku where you can mark the background colours of squares that cannot contain the 1 and 9 in some order. They may also prove useful with some other puzzle types, and depending on how you wish to solve them: whilst you never need to guess to solve our puzzles, if you wish to take a guess in order to increase your solving speed, you could for instance colour the background of each square along the path of a guess. Or, if you are learning to identify and implement certain rules such as X-wings when solving, you might highlighting is useful as a teaching aid for you.

Save Game Function

When you are logged in, you will be able to click the 'Save' button to save the position of your game. Then when you load the game again it will revert to your current position. This is great if you want to solve in more than one session. We will also log which puzzles you have and haven't solved each day, so you can easily come back at a later date and see at a glance which puzzles are brand new, which you have successfully solved, and also the ones you are partway through solving should you wish to finish them off.

We also have a range of videos that show the puzzle solver in use, and the rules / how to solve several of the puzzle types, so these may also prove useful for any puzzle types that you are unfamiliar with.