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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3256 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anybody else play Picross? I've been a Picross fiend since a friend lent me Mario's Picross on the original Gameboy back in elementary school. I don't think I ever gave it back. I was overjoyed when it got released on the DS, as I hadn't played it in probably 10 years at that point. I even played the kinda goofy 3D Picross.

There are a shit ton of them on the Switch. Slowly working my way through Picross S3 these days. I think they are up to Picross S8 though. It's more or less an annual title.

I don't think I've ever actually met another live human who played them, minus that one friend who got me hooked way back when.

I love picross! I got addicted to it when I went to Singapore for a vacation and spent the whole time in the hospital. 3d picross is my favourite though, it feels more engaging. I don't know of any good regular picross games on phones (drastic + ds roms is how I've been playing it, if you have a big phone it's great) but I do know a pretty good 3d picross alternative - Voxelgram - it costs money, but is well worth it imo. Voxelgram is also on steam, but picross of any flavour without a touch screen doesn't do it for me.

I used to love Picross on DS back in the day when the DS was a recently released system. I dropped it after I finished the cartridge, but I got into it for a few months a few years back on the phone. It's definitely my favorite of the simple time-waster logic puzzle games, but I haven't thought about it in a while.

I've played so much liouh.com/picross/. It's a randomly generated puzzle each time. It's very responsive and lightweight. And you get a very colourful victory effect after painstakingly filling those cells. Sometimes you get a puzzle with multiple solutions but the game will only accept one and give you the disappointing grey ending if you arbitrarily pick wrong.

Just searching for it now, I found a new version, liouh.com/picross2/ which changes the game a bit so you can make a wrong move and correct it later, instead of having each mistake immediately pointed out. It feels a bit more like sudoku now.

I always thought that the best way to describe the game is "binary sudoku with regular expressions" but none of my CS uni peers agreed :(

edit: fixed links

1679718010868 has 2 solutions

Are the puzzles guaranteed solvable?

Yeah that's one example where there are two possible solutions but the game only accepts one. I think this is because each game is generated by first randomly coming up with the desired board state, and then deriving the row and column rules from that. But the same set of row and column rules can be satisfied by multiple board states.

However I put the same seed in the second version of the game and it accepted both solutions.

The DS and 3DS with the stylus were perfect for nonograms, manually moving the cursor from cell to cell by using the direction keys is painful. If you are interested someone on /vr/ compiled nearly all the releases, theres are probably more to be found, if one searches for the Japanese name of this puzzle (Oekaki Logic).

Edit: For Android there is the free as in Linux (free, no ads, offline, no microtransaction), Simon Tatham's Puzzles, which among many others, includes this logic puzzle under the name "Pattern". The pictures are randomly generated, but this is beneficial as it prevents guessing.

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