Mechanical Puzzles Blog

Crosses and Circles, The Mahabharata, and the Legacy of Ludo
If you play board games, chances are good that you've seen or played at least one game in the “Cross and Circle” family of board games (so called b...

Thinking Outside the Board - Infinity Checkers
The subject of today’s article has suffered a kind of identity crisis; none of the names applied so far have really stuck. It originated in Java, w...

The Odyssey of Sudoku
  In my post about Go, I mentioned how Japanese logic puzzles such as kakuro, nurikabe and hashiwokakero (Bridges) derive many heuristics from a fe...

Fanorona and Corona - Creativity and Isolation
As you might expect from the title, this is going to be yet more thoughts on a topic that we all find literally inescapable these days. As I write ...

We Regret The Error - Thoughts About the Game of Solitaire
Did you know that Haagen-Dazs was invented in the Bronx? It’s true; Danish doesn’t even have an umlaut. It’s an example of foreign branding--the tr...

Cribbage Can Be Murder
Among card games, cribbage is an oddity. It uses a standard deck of playing cards, but the way you include your opponent’s hand and the discarded “...

Complexity From Simplicity - A Brief Look at Go
Here at Kubiya games we love our classics, and there are few games older than the strategy game Go. It's a great game with a following as large as ...

The Unsolving of Tic-Tac-Toe
 When my oldest child was playing with neighbors at the age of seven, I heard a familiar taunt: “Becky and Joey, sittin’ in a tree….”  I’m sure you...

Chess - The First Thousand Years
Here’s a riddle for you: what game started in India, got its name from Persia as viewed by Byzantium, has rules from Spain and Italy, and the oldes...

Praise for the Pentomino Puzzle Platform
How many ways can you arrange two square tiles so that they share at least edge? It doesn’t take much to show that there’s only one way: form a rec...

Party Puzzles and Drinking Games
Like most great family traditions, I don’t remember how it started. Whenever guests arrive and dinner is still in the oven, one of the kids will go...

Towards More Practical Puzzling
These past few months, I’ve found myself pondering the value of a good puzzle. Are they really just for clever people to show off? Is there any pra...