The Puzzle Collection you didn't know you needed
May 29, 2026
Simon Tatham is best known as the author of PuTTY, the open-source SSH client that ships on roughly half the Windows machines in corporate IT. He is also responsible for, quietly, one of the finest collections of logic puzzle implementations ever written.
The Portable Puzzle Collection contains 39 individual puzzle games — Sudoku, Slitherlink, Minesweeper variants, Nonogram, and 35 others. Each one is a self-contained executable. Each one has been implemented from scratch, carefully, by someone who clearly thought about what “correctly implemented” means.
The design philosophy
The collection’s design document is worth reading in full if you’re interested in game design. The short version: every puzzle in the collection is solvable by logic alone. There is no puzzle that requires guessing. If you are stuck, the answer is always reachable by further deduction.
This sounds obvious. It is not the norm. Most Minesweeper implementations, for instance, have board configurations where some cells can only be resolved by guessing and accepting a coin-flip probability of death. Tatham’s Mines implementation generates boards that guarantee a logical solution exists for any revealed starting position. The generation is constrained at the point of creation so that the playing experience is constrained in the way good puzzle design requires.
The same principle applies across the collection. Patterns (the Nonogram variant) never requires a guess. Same with Unruly, Towers, Pearl, Light Up, and the rest. When a puzzle in this collection is hard, it is hard because the required deduction is subtle — not because the game needs you to accept arbitrary uncertainty.
What “portable” means
The “portable” in the name is literal. Tatham built the collection to compile to native applications on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Unix. It also compiles to WebAssembly via Emscripten, which is how it runs in a browser. The game logic is written once in C and runs everywhere.
This is not an unusual engineering decision in 2026. In 1994 — when Tatham started building the foundations — it was a considered commitment to a kind of software longevity that most developers don’t think about. The result is software that has been actively maintained for 30 years and runs natively on every platform without emulation.
The experience
Tatham Puzzles runs in a tab. There are no ads. No account. No save state warning. No dark patterns designed to get you to accept a notification prompt. You open a puzzle, you play it, you close the tab.
The interface is spartan to the point of being calming. Click to reveal. Right-click to flag. Keyboard shortcuts for everything. The aesthetics are functional and dated in the way that functional and dated software often is — which is to say, they are fine, and the game does not need them to be more.
The difficulty settings generate genuinely harder puzzles, not just bigger grids. The procedural generation means the puzzle you play today is different from the one you played yesterday.
It is the right kind of puzzle game for the right kind of day.