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I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing. And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn't available the next time I was sitting at a Windows machine, or vice versa; so I arranged that everything in my personal puzzle collection will happily run on both, and have more recently done a port to Mac OS X as well. When I find (or perhaps invent) further puzzle games that I like, they'll be added to this collection and will immediately be available on both platforms. And if anyone feels like writing any other front ends – PocketPC, Mac OS pre-10, or whatever it might be – then all the games in this framework will immediately become available on another platform as well.
The actual games in this collection were mostly not my invention; they are re-implementations of existing game concepts within my portable puzzle framework. I do not claim credit, in general, for inventing the rules of any of these puzzles. (I don't even claim authorship of all the code; some of the puzzles have been submitted by other authors.)
This collection is distributed under the MIT licence (see appendix A). This means that you can do pretty much anything you like with the game binaries or the code, except pretending you wrote them yourself, or suing me if anything goes wrong.
The most recent versions, and source code, can be found at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/.
Please report bugs to anakin@pobox.com. You might find it helpful to read this article before reporting a bug:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
Patches are welcome. Especially if they provide a new front end (to make all these games run on another platform), or a new game.