Puzzle Bucket List

Cut the playing field into pieces without letting the bouncing balls touch your line; four kilobytes of it.

An Atari puzzle game about a robot pushing crates and dodging lasers, still being remade forty years on.

A book you play: numbered paragraphs, a choice at the end of each, a pencil for your inventory and dice if it has them. Start with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Lone Wolf or any Choose Your Own Adventure.

The same idea drawn rather than written - panels connected by tubes and arrows that send you across the page or back three pages. Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile is the one everybody means.

One murder, a grid of suspects, weapons and locations, and just enough clues to eliminate everything but the answer. There are hundreds, in books and one a day online.

A puzzle-platformer where the furniture turns into monsters the moment the light goes out.

Build a stained-glass window from dice, obeying colour and shade rules.

A two-player quilt of Tetris pieces and a time track instead of turns.

The palace garden on hexes, where a tile has to share a colour or a plant with its neighbour.

The roll-and-write take on the tile-and-wildlife hit.

Quilt-building for cats: a spatial puzzle that punishes one wrong tile.

The best of the Azul family, with wild tiles and a gentler penalty for what you cannot place.

Rescue polyomino cats from a sinking island before Vesh Darkhand arrives.

A one-shot escape room in a box that you cut up and write on.

The one real expansion: double-sided boards and a plastic overlay that lets you choose where the pattern goes.

Two players decorating the vaults of the palace, one by day and one by night.

The same drafting moved into a chocolate shop, scoring boxes filled by colour and by shape.

App-timed escape-room decks that hide their puzzles inside the artwork.

Panes instead of tiles, and a glazier who only ever moves clockwise around the factories.

A card game where you can see everyone's hand but your own.

Nine people, an ally-or-betray vote every round, and a flowchart you jump around to reach the truth.

Luigi with a vacuum cleaner in a haunted house; the GameCube launch oddity.

Draw subway lines for a growing city until it jams; the minimalist transit puzzle.

Lay hexagonal tiles into a landscape; the cosiest strategy game.

Slide tiles to make threes; the small puzzle 2048 cloned.

Somersault past robots, search furniture, "another visitor; stay a while, stay forever".

Place buildings on small islands for points; ten-minute city-building calm.

A cat in a cyberpunk city of robots; meow on command.

One five-letter word a day and a grid to share; the New York Times bought it in 2022.

Wobbly men solve physics puzzles badly; No Brakes Games.