Puzzle guides
Strategy worth reading: actual techniques, explained properly, for the kinds of puzzles we cover. Written by us after playing the games, not assembled from other people’s listicles.
How to Solve Sudoku: From Your First Scan to Expert Technique
Most people learn Sudoku by staring at the grid until a number appears. There is a much faster way, and it is entirely teachable. Here are the techniques that take you from Easy to Expert, in the order you should learn them.
5 min read20 August 2026
StrategyMahjong Solitaire Strategy: Nine Rules That Actually Work
Mahjong solitaire looks like a matching game and plays like a resource management one. Most losses are self-inflicted, and avoiding them comes down to about nine habits.
5 min read19 August 2026
StrategyHow to Get Better at Hidden Object Games
Finding things quickly is a trainable skill, not a talent. Here is what actually improves your search speed, and why staring harder is the worst possible strategy.
4 min read18 August 2026
FeatureWhy Puzzle Games Feel So Good
Puzzle games are among the simplest things you can play and among the hardest to stop playing. The reasons are mostly design, and they are worth understanding.
5 min read17 August 2026
StrategyWord Puzzle Tactics: Finding Words Faster in Any Grid
Word puzzles reward vocabulary less than people assume and search technique far more. Here is how to find words faster in grids of any shape.
4 min read16 August 2026
FeatureMatch-3 vs Merge: Which Puzzle Genre Fits How You Think?
They share a screen shape and a colour palette, but match-3 and merge games ask for almost opposite things. Knowing which you actually enjoy saves a lot of wasted evenings.
4 min read15 August 2026
What these guides are for
Most “puzzle tips” writing online is the same six sentences rearranged: take your time, use hints wisely, practice makes perfect. None of it is wrong and none of it changes how you play. These guides try to do the opposite, name specific, teachable techniques, explain why they work, and say when to use them.
Where a technique has a standard name, we use it. Sudoku players talk about naked singles, hidden singles and pointing pairs because those are precise ideas worth being able to refer to, and learning them in that order is what takes someone from Easy puzzles to Expert ones. The same applies elsewhere: mahjong solitaire has a real four-tile problem, and visual search has a genuine failure mode in object blindness.
How we write them
Every guide is written after playing the games it describes, and every rule we state is checked against how the game actually behaves rather than how its store listing describes it. Where a guide touches on psychology: why an unfinished puzzle is hard to walk away from, why staring harder stops working, we describe well-established concepts in general terms and avoid citing studies we have not read.
That last point is deliberate. The puzzle genre is full of confident claims about brain training and cognitive benefit that the evidence does not support. You will not find those here. Puzzles are worth playing because they are absorbing, and that is a good enough reason on its own.
Where to start
- New to a genre? Start with the guide for it, then play the games linked inside, each article points at the specific titles it is describing.
- Stuck on something specific? The Sudoku and Mahjong guides are organised by technique, so you can jump to the one you have not learnt yet.
- Not sure what you enjoy? Match-3 vs Merge and Why Puzzle Games Feel So Good are about choosing, not winning.
Every article links to the relevant games, and every game page carries its own tips section for the things that are specific to that title.