Best Deduction

Nurikabe is a binary-determination logic puzzle originating from Japan, where it has been published by the puzzle company Nikoli since 1991. Solvers are presented with a grid containing numbered cells and must determine which cells to shade. The unshaded cells form "islands" containing exactly one n...

Tsumego (詰碁) are Go life-and-death puzzles requiring the player to find the sequence that captures or secures a group of stones, practiced as a core training method in East Asian Go tradition for over a thousand years.

Rise of the Golden Idol is a detective-themed puzzle game developed by the Latvian studio Color Gray Games and released in 2024. Serving as a sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, the game shifts its setting to the 1970s to explore a new overarching mystery. Players must observe static scenes, coll...

The Roottrees are Dead is a 2023 genealogical detective puzzle game developed by Jeremy Johnston. Players use a simulated 1990s web search interface to investigate the branches of a wealthy family tree, verifying claims of biological relations to determine the correct heirs of a corporate fortune. T...

The Rise of the Golden Idol is an indie deduction and puzzle game developed by Color Gray Games and scheduled for release in 2024. It serves as a standalone sequel to the 2022 title The Case of the Golden Idol, advancing the timeline roughly two centuries into a 1970s setting. The gameplay consists...

The Zebra Puzzle (often attributed to Albert Einstein, though without firm evidence) is a classic five-house logic grid puzzle that popularized the deductive constraint satisfaction genre in the 20th century.

Killer Sudoku is a logic puzzle that combines the standard Sudoku grid with elements of Kakuro arithmetic. The 9x9 grid contains no pre-filled numbers; instead, cells are grouped into cages marked with a target sum. Solvers must deduce the placement of digits from 1 to 9, ensuring that no number rep...

Chants of Sennaar is a 2023 adventure and puzzle game developed by French independent studio Rundisc and published by Focus Entertainment. The gameplay is centered entirely around language decipherment, requiring players to observe non-playable characters and their environments to deduce meanings of...

Fillomino is a grid-based logic puzzle published by the Japanese company Nikoli. The objective is to divide the grid into regions known as polyominoes. Each cell within a given region must contain a number equal to the total number of cells in that region. While some numbers are provided as starting...

Picross 3D is a puzzle game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS in 2009. It adapts the traditional 2D nonogram logic puzzle format into a 3D space. Players use the stylus to chip away at blocks in a large cube, using numerical clues on the rows and columns to de...

Star Battle is a logic puzzle played on a grid that is divided into outlined, irregularly shaped regions. Solvers must place a specific number of stars into the grid such that every row, column, and outlined region contains the required amount. The primary rule constraint is that stars cannot touch...

Thermo-Sudoku is a variant of the traditional Sudoku puzzle that incorporates a constraint based on thermometer-shaped lines drawn on the grid. Along each thermometer line, digits must strictly increase in value starting from the unnumbered bulb end and moving toward the tip. Standard Sudoku rules s...

Knights and Knaves is a class of logic puzzles set on a fictional island where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie, formalized by logician Raymond Smullyan in his 1978 book What Is the Name of This Book?

Codenames remains the gold standard for accessible and engaging party games. Two teams compete to identify their secret agents based on one-word clues given by their spymasters. Its simple rules belie a surprising depth of strategy and clever wordplay. The game's adaptability makes it perfect for la...

Hashiwokakero, meaning 'build bridges' in Japanese, is a grid-based logic puzzle published by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli and also known by the English name Bridges. The puzzle consists of a grid containing numbered circles representing islands, where each number indicates the total bridges c...

Quarto! is an abstract strategy board game designed by Swiss mathematician Blaise Müller and published by Gigamic in 1991. It is played on a four-by-four grid using pieces that possess four distinct characteristics: tall or short, light or dark, round or square, and solid or hollow. The objective is...

German Whispers Sudoku is a variant of Sudoku in which a supplementary constraint applies to marked lines within the grid: adjacent digits along each marked line must differ by at least 5. The constraint is named after the party game 'telephone' ('Chinese whispers' or 'German whispers'), reflecting...

Heyawake is a grid-based logic puzzle published by Nikoli, played on a rectangular grid subdivided into rectangular rooms. The solver must shade some cells according to three constraints: numbered rooms contain exactly the indicated number of shaded cells; no two shaded cells may be orthogonally adj...

Arrow Sudoku is a logic puzzle variant that overlays standard Sudoku rules with arithmetic constraints. The grid features arrows originating from empty circles. The digit placed in a circled cell must equal the sum of the digits placed along the corresponding arrow's path. While standard Sudoku rule...

Loopy is a loop-drawing logic puzzle, included in Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, where players draw a single closed loop through grid dots using clues about how many loop segments border each cell.

Yajilin is a logic puzzle published by Nikoli where solvers draw a single continuous, closed loop through a grid. Numbered cells with arrows act as clues, indicating the exact count of black cells located in the specified direction along that row or column. All remaining cells that are not part of t...

The Tower of Hanoi is a mathematical puzzle invented by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas in 1883. It consists of three pegs and a stack of discs of differing sizes, with the objective of moving the entire stack from one peg to another while observing two rules: only one disc may be moved at a...

Tapa is a wall-shading puzzle invented by Turkish puzzle designer Serkan Yürekli in which cells are blacked out to create one connected wall, guided by clue numbers showing adjacent shaded-cell group sizes.

MicroMacro: Crime City is a 2020 hidden-object detective game by Johannes Sich, notable for winning the 2021 Spiel des Jahres.

Cryptarithmetic (or cryptarithmetic) is a mathematical puzzle form, first popularized by Henry Dudeney in 1914 with SEND + MORE = MONEY, in which digits are substituted for letters in arithmetic equations.

Numberlink is a grid-based logic puzzle in which solvers must connect pairs of identical numbers using continuous paths. The rules typically dictate that paths must not cross or branch and that every cell in the grid must be occupied by a path. Popularized internationally by the Japanese publisher N...

Cryptid is a deduction board game released in 2018, notable for giving each player a unique clue that must be combined logically to pinpoint the location of a hidden creature.

Renban Sudoku is a variation of the standard Sudoku puzzle that introduces "Renban lines," which are often highlighted in a distinct color. The digits placed along each of these lines must form a set of consecutive, non-repeating integers, though they can be arranged in any order. For example, a lin...

The Blue Eyes Puzzle is a common-knowledge epistemic logic puzzle in which an arbitrarily large group of blue-eyed islanders must deduce and act on their own eye color once a public announcement triggers shared reasoning.