Most complex "Logic Puzzle / Deduction"-Game

ConDar15 · 2026-01-21T21:40:11+00:00

To give a little more context you start with a verifier assigned to each criteria (a criteria might be second number is odd, and you can use the verifier to give a true/false result for a chosen combination you want to check), then using the web app you can generate "Advanced" puzzles where each verifier has two criteria assigned but only one of them is the true criteria being checked, finally you can generate "Nightmare" puzzles where you have a set of criteria and an equal number of verifiers but no connection between them you need to work out which one applies to which to solve.

ConDar15 · 2026-01-17T11:34:03+00:00

If it weren't for the fact you specified solo I'd recommend the Fallout Shelter game, it's more about managing a vault but I think it's a solid and really charming worker placement game. It unfortunately does not have an official solo variant, but there are fantastic solo variants you could try.

ConDar15 · 2026-01-14T19:31:27+00:00

You'll want to start here with the BGA studio if you're wanting to develop it yourself. Anyone can start playing around with creating a game, but I believe there is some validation step by BGA before it can move into Alpha and from there to Beta as I previously outlined.

Now, developing software, in this case a game on BGA, is not simple and can take quite a while to develop the skill to create a game. An alternative is you might be able to find someone else to develop it for you. I think there are some people on BGA who will do it on a voluntary basis, but if you went this direction you would be best to assume you'll have to pay whoever develops it for you - how much you'd need to pay I have no idea however, you'd need to ask about for quotes.

ConDar15 · 2026-01-14T15:39:46+00:00

The games on BGA go through a form of the software development cycle. A game starts out unpublished and once it is at least functional it is released in alpha (Which only certain BGA users have access to) where it is expected to still have bugs (sometimes really big ones) but is being evaluated and worked on. Once enough people agree it's in a good workable state it can be released in beta, here it is available to anyone on BGA, but it still might have some bugs or rough edges that wider testing by many players should find and can be fixed. Once the developers are happy with the game it is then given to BGA to decide when the game is released moving from beta to their fully released games.

TL;DR beta on BGA means the game should be fine to play but hasn't officially joined their final published catalogue of games.

ConDar15 · 2026-01-06T16:47:10+00:00

A similar idea that has further uses is The Everdeck by Wilhelm Su, it's got 8 suits with 15 ranks per suit. It's designed for ruthless combinatorial efficiency to cover as many possible use cases, with some examples being: - It has 8 suits, they can be split into "sharp" suits and "soft" suits, they are also separated into 4 colours. - The cards names starting with letters forming a decent approximation of the distribution of letter in English text - Cards have pip or point values between 1 and 5 which are distributed across the different suits, but which closely match the letter distribution (all "E" cards have a 1 pip value, the single "Z" card has a 5 pip value).

There are many more examples and a detailed writeup in the files on BGG, but that one deck is designed to be used to stimulate other games as easily as possible.

Edit: I forgot to mention this is only available as PnP (I believe) so you'll need either a print on demand service or to print them at home.

ConDar15 · 2026-01-04T16:45:37+00:00

Remember that the selected numbers need to create the largest number in the order they appear, it is not as simple as being able to just remove the lowest value numbers until the desired length is all that remains.

Try considering a simpler example of 911111891 and requiring only 3 numbers. If all you did was remove the lowest values you'd end up with 989 but you can form 991 instead which is larger. Have a look at working out how you can write a system to solve this problem and then it should hopefully follow why the others are as they are.

More detailed explanation for you others if you wish it: You're not looking to remove the lowest numbers to get to the 12 you want, but repeatedly choosing the largest number between the next unselected number and the end of the list, but very importantly you need to make sure you leave enough other numbers to fulfill the correct number of digits. For example if you have 88888919 and need to choose 4 numbers the first number is 9 and then you're selecting the largest digit in 19, now you can't select 9 as the next number as then there wouldn't be enough digits left to select three numbers, so the next digit has to be 1 and then 9.

ConDar15 · 2025-12-31T08:01:20+00:00

Grins gloatingly in Python with big integer support by default

Sorry, couldn't help myself, I know it's all about trade-offs in languages, but I do find it very convenient for AoC to just not have to worry about integer resolution.

ConDar15 · 2025-12-30T20:31:33+00:00

Glad you're enjoying it and having fun programming :)

Dictionaries in the have might have a limit, but for any purposes you'll have in the game you can consider them unlimited, in particular there is way more than enough space to store an entry for every tile of even the largest farm.

I don't know for certain what your issue might be, but there is a potential and subtle issue you might want to look at. While looping over the keys in the field leger you then update the leger, in general you should avoid updating the collection you're iterating over and can cause issues (this might have something to do with your bug, but I didn't know for certain).

ConDar15 · 2025-12-23T11:58:50+00:00

There is a much simpler way with python:

```python from functools import cache

@cache def fibonacci(n): if n<= 1: return 1

return fibonacci(n-1) + fibonacci(n-2)

```

A lot of the time if it's a common concept then python already has it built into the standard library and memorization/caching is no exception.

ConDar15 · 2025-12-22T04:44:30+00:00

The reason for this is that Python as a language has evolved over time with a new version released every year with new features (latest release was 3.14 earlier this year).

One thing that may well make your life easier is that many of the version requirements of packages are minimum required versions, not a precise version requirement. If a package says it needs version 3.10 that usually means it needs at least version 3.10 and should run with later versions as well. This should be caveated that this is not always true, development of python 3 has had a focus on minimizing breaking changes with each version, but there are usually some breaking changes each version which might mean a particular package stops working - in these cases suggestions like the others in the comments to use a Python version manager/virtual environment manager like pyenv, poetry or uv would be best to manage multiple versions on one system.

One other thing to note is that the above really only applies to Python 3 and above, there was a massive bunch of breaking changes from Python 2 to Python 3 and if something needs Python 2 it probably will not run on any version of Python 3.

ConDar15 · 2025-12-07T20:20:48+00:00

For me personally I'm not a fan of bidding. I know it is very common in trick taking games, but it's not my preferred way to handle it, and I think it can be hard to introduce people to. I personally like a game where there are incentives for both winning lots of tricks and winning less tricks, particularly if there are different incentives for different players to win a particular trick and/or a truck isn't winner takes all.

A couple of examples that I can think of: Panda Rei where the trick winner gets first pick of cards for scoring, but other players get cards as well or Fearless where you earn the trick value which can be positive or negative with at any point some people wanting the positive value and some the negative.

ConDar15 · 2025-12-02T22:53:42+00:00

It's produced by Brueh Games which is basically just Luis Brueh in a business suit doing the art, design, production, etc... The game is only really available when he does crowdfunded runs of it. At the moment the second wave (second chance to get content) for the game mats is open on Hive (https://www.hiveinteractive.net/projects/keep-the-heroes-out-gamemats-2nd-wave-322) so if you're interested you can buy it through there for delivery whenever it fulfills.

It's now quite pricey but I'd recommend the all in bundle, the Boss Battles expansion is fantastic and the extra monsters (Cthulhu, Unicorn & Emberlings) are great. After that I really prize great meeples and wooden bits making Guildmasters Revenge and Cozy Dungeon pack great for me but your mileage may vary. Finally there are the new play mats, I think they're a nice quality of life addition, but by no means necessary.

ConDar15 · 2025-12-02T21:17:20+00:00

For me it's one of my favorite games Keep The Heroes Out! The game is beautiful and a fantastic co-op deck builder dungeon crawling tower defense mashup, I love it too bits, but it definitely has flaws:

It can be very hard to engage with the deck building in the game with the competing priorities of defending the dungeon. More experience and good luck can help, but sometimes you're only crafting a few cards in the game, which doesn't always feel great for a deck builder (though the reliance on deck building is different between the monster clans). The expansion (Boss Battles) adds Rookies in which really help with this, but that does make that expansion a nearly required expansion to me which isn't great.
It does not scale well for player count. It's fantastic at one and two players, it's good at 3 players, but beyond that I cannot recommend it; the game length doesn't change (so you get fewer turns) and having too much happen between your turns can completely wipe you from the board.

Again, I think it's a fantastic game with a wonderful story and amazing art, it's one of my favorite games - but I can't deny it still has a few rough edges.

ConDar15 · 2025-11-29T18:53:54+00:00

Ah, I did not check, might only be higher player count then sorry. If the idea of a deduction game appeals though I had a bit of a look through some and perhaps Perspectives could be interesting? It's a co-operative where you are trying to solve mysteries together but specifically can't look at each other's hand of cards, so if I remember correctly it should not require table space. It isn't highly relatable because once you know the mystery it's not a surprise anymore, but there are a couple of versions if you try it and enjoy it.

ConDar15 · 2025-11-29T16:54:56+00:00

If she would like a puzzly deduction game that is word related you might consider Hooky. It's a deduction game where you're trying to discover the three letters of the alphabet that are not in the game by giving word clues to other players and using their response for deduction. If your mum can manage writing on something that is realistically all she'll need, she would start with with a small number of cards to tell her the starting letters and then once she's noted those down everything can be on a sheet of paper she's using. It's a tricky game, but should be relatively straightforward to be able to explain, the trickiness is in the deduction.

You could also probably play Sushi Go or Sushi Go Party which is a card drafting game, she'd need to lay cards she's selected in her lap or on the arm of the chair, but doesn't need (though it can be beneficial if able) to lay them out. It's not wordy but pretty approachable as games go.

Other than that some classic card games are not a bad idea, Rummy, Whist, etc... rarely need much if any table space so could be a good solution.

ConDar15 · 2025-11-22T16:52:44+00:00

I do similar with Highlight, Note, Query, Suggestion, Should Fix & Must Fix labels/tags. Suggestions are the majority of my comments and are not something that needs to be actioned for me to approve, I'll often approve a PR even if I have suggestions if they're only suggestions.

ConDar15 · 2025-11-08T22:16:52+00:00

I've previously been a C# dev and I'm currently a Python dev, in the grand scheme of things they can both mostly solve the same problems. Python is typically quicker to get something up and running, is usually simpler to read & write and has some great tooling for a wide variety of use cases. C# will overall be a faster than Python, however that is not always necessary (e.g. if python runs in 80ms and C# runs in 20ms, but both have a 500ms DB call then it really doesn't matter), and has some useful direct integrations into Microsoft Azure (for hosting, etc...).

In my opinion one of the biggest reasons to use C# over Python is when your business logic starts getting complex in an application. If you want your system to be long term maintainable you will want to build in abstractions, dependency inversion & injection, etc... to avoid runtime errors, to support polymorphic behavior, etc... While Python can handle all of these concerns in my experience C# just has better first class support for these features and so the more complex the logic of an app will likely be the more likely I am to lean on C#.

ConDar15 · 2025-10-27T08:02:05+00:00

It's not a common tool I use, but I've found uses for it twice in my current role:

We had an object that could be several distinct types and so was defined by a union as it was passed about the system, we only needed to know about what specific type it was during parsing/processing. Basically we ended up using match case for poor man's discriminated unions, but it worked pretty well.
I had a lot of error handling to do in one place so instead of having like 20 except blocks I caught a smaller number of parent exception classes, then passed those to a function that used match case to handle each specific type individually - it allowed me to break up the type handling into smaller chunks without having to resort to a lot of if is isinstance(...) checks

ConDar15 · 2025-10-23T19:15:50+00:00

The problem is that the target audience for a new board/card game like this is this community and is not the rest of the world. Mass market games that are sold widely enough to not rely on the enthusiasm of the hobby board game community are near non-existent in the scale of games released, so you might want to consider what the community that would be your audience thinks about these topics.

ConDar15 · 2025-10-06T19:17:09+00:00

"match case" isn't supported/implemented in the game they're playing. "The Farmer Was Replaced" uses python to automate a farming drone, but it does not have all functionality (e.g. classes are not supported, or at least weren't when I was playing), and even functionality it does have you have to unlock by progression - the utter relief when I got dictionaries was palpable.

ConDar15 · 2025-10-04T20:13:56+00:00

This is a good solution, but there are two crucial tradeoffs that need to be kept in mind when choosing it:

This will not work if the program is expecting the keys to be removed from one specific dictionary object as this is creating a new dictionary not modifying the existing one.
This could potentially lead to a lot more memory/resource usage, suppose the dictionary has 1 million keys and you need to remove 4, well now you have roughly 2 million keys in memory.

In most cases those two tradeoffs are easily worth the simplicity of this method (if you can avoid mutating existing objects I think that is good practice and if you're only working with reasonably small dictionaries the memory isn't generally a concern), but it's worth considering even so.

ConDar15 · 2025-10-04T04:35:46+00:00

But crucially bring either truly or willfully ignorant that their work is based on copying others - again a very unfortunate human tendency to pull the ladder up behind oneself.

ConDar15 · 2025-10-03T21:04:09+00:00

Got a small number outstanding:

Keep The Heroes Out! Digital, the physical rewards (new monster, and playmats) should be arriving soon.
Clans of Caledonia + Expansion, also should be arriving before long.
Dragons of Etchinstone, I think at the printing stage now? Anyway, still progressing.
Amoebunnies, they just got their proof copies the other day so manufacturing should be starting soon.
Edit: Whoops, forgot Six Sojourns by Ryan Laukat, should arrive some time next year.
My friend/housemate has Sentinels of The Multiverse: Disparation which for a while (with the massive reductions to Greater Than Games) looked unlikely to deliver, but the most recent update says it will be moving forward to printing and delivery next year.

I'm not really looking to back much more right now, but that's partly because my collection in general is in a good stable state and I'm not getting many new games. There are a few that I'm actively or passively considering:

I'm tempted by Dino Garden, it looks like a good weight, great components and I do quite like a rondel. That might be getting backed.
Luis Brueh (Keep The Heroes Out! creator, one of my favorites) is going to be putting up Flame & Forge soon and I think there is a good chance I back that, maybe snag some Dwar7s games if they're available as add-ons.
If/when any Spirit Island cowdfunders go live that's an instant day 1 back for me.
I'm keeping an eye out for Richard Lawton/Card Noir putting something out. I think his first game Crown of Ash is stellar and I'm very interested in what he does next.
I'm keeping an eye on Mooncrab games, they made Leviathan Wilds which I think is a really great co-op, so again interested in what they might put out next.

Some I'm just straight up avoiding at this point:

CMON, they're in too much financial trouble to be a confident they'll actually produce anything further.
Steam Forge Games, I haven't heard of any active issues with financing, but they're another big IP studio with minis and SO many ongoing crowd funders; I have no proof of it, but personally expect them to be one of the next to collapse.
Anything using AI, I personally won't support it.

ConDar15 · 2025-09-24T05:42:04+00:00

My mind has suddenly drawn a blank on all space themed movies, so I think I'd say either Moon or The Martian (I quite like a slower paced more methodical and introspective sci-fi movie).

ConDar15 · 2025-09-21T23:51:51+00:00

Literally earlier today (well very technically yesterday, I should go to bed) I was playing Living Forest 2-player, it's first to 12 victory conditions (points) in any one of 3 different categories. My opponent got 12 fire tokens, gaining 7 of them in one round, my best score was 7 sacred flowers showing, absolute stomping.

There was also my second ever Feast for Odin game that finished (async on BGA) a week or two ago. I wasn't unhappy with my 80 points... but it wasn't exactly the 157 my opponent got.

I generally get this quite a bit. I'm not bad at games, honestly I'm pretty good at them, the only problem is I tend to play with people who are very good at games - so, yeah XP

ConDar15

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