Last updated on January 27th, 2026 at 11:10 pm
Simon Tatham's Puzzles – Puzzle Game Review
Simon Tatham's Puzzles is a Puzzle/Entertainment game from Greg Hewgill, first launched in 31st March 2013.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 233+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Simon Tatham's Puzzles Stand Out
This is a collection of 38 single-player puzzle games for the iPhone and iPad. Included games are:
Black Box – Bridges – Cube – Dominosa – Fifteen – Flip – Flood – Filling – Galaxies – Guess – Inertia – Keen – Light Up – Loopy – Magnets – Map – Mines – Net – Netslide – Pattern – Pearl – Pegs – Range – Rectangles – Same Game – Signpost – Singles – Sixteen – Slant – Solo – Tents – Towers – Tracks – Twiddle – Undead – Unequal – Unruly – Untangle
This Puzzle game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Simon Tatham's Puzzles is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 21st September 2020
Recent improvements include:
- Add an Erase button to Undead
- Use display safe area for devices without Home button
Thanks for George and Jacob for contributing these fixes on Github.
Download & Availability
Simon Tatham's Puzzles is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Simon Tatham's Puzzles on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Quality puzzle games with no ads, charity work like this is awesome.
Free, fun and excellent very of games.
This is a perfect app for when you need to kill a few minutes, but dont want to get hit with saturated colors, animations, or ads. No tracking or telemetry as far as we can tell. Puzzles are generated on your device, so you dont need an internet connection. Great for avoiding worse distractions while testing code changes at work, having something to do on the bus, and Ive even used it for several hours at a time on flights.
This app is fantastic! It has so many varieties of puzzle games and so many settings to tweak to make them just as easy or hard and big or small as you want them to be!! Our only (minor) gripe is the lack of a zoom functionality, but even without that, it's a magnificent collection of puzzle games that everyone should have installed.
Simple offline puzzles with no ads. Exactly as advertised.
This game comes with SO MANY types of puzzles to play, and we absolutely adore it. While Im used to some of the puzzles (like Galaxies and Pattern as theyre named here) creating a pretty picture by solving them in other apps, Im totally fine with sacrificing that artistic function in favor of being able to generate as many of the puzzles as we want with no in-App purchases. Not to mention, on our big iPad screen, the custom puzzles we can make it generate are HUGE and so, so satisfying to complete.
This collection of both classic & original logic puzzles is clean, simple, and to-the-point. If you're looking for fancy graphics or high-stakes timed games, keep looking. But if you're sick of all the ads and unnecessary bells & whistles in most mobile puzzle games, this is the game for you.
This is a puzzle collection, with an incredible amount of customizable, fun puzzles. It has no ads, no in app purchases, no nonsense.
Puzzles for free with no ads. We particularly like the galaxies puzzle.
This app is truly amazing. No ads, no paywalls, and the puzzles are generated each time so there's no worry about ever running out or reaching the end of the levels. We are so grateful for whatever kind programer made this app. The only tweaks we would suggest is making the instructions clearer for mobile use. The instructions are clearly for use on desktop. That said, it's not hard to figure out how to use the controls.
We wouldn't switch from android to iOS until we found out this app was available on iOS.
We were so exhausted by the constant ads and pushing microtransactions and feature-creeps of other free puzzle games. This is a great little collection of puzzles, both familiar and new :).
Great collection, we hope you update it soon.
No ads, no spam, no nonsense. Not all puzzles are for us, there are some we simply find infuriating, others are absolutely addicting. This has been our go to app for a while and we still havent tried them all. Thank you so much, whoever you are, Simon Tatham.
This is the best game you can get in the app store, it has no ads, its totally free, it has a variety of games which you can change difficulty on and they never end, it is so so so much fun. The only thing Id change, we dont know if Im an idiot and Im missing something but on minesweeper, how do you flag? We cant figure it out. Otherwise amazing game.
This puzzle set is easily one of the most underappreciated apps out there. Simple, but addictive puzzles, easy interfaces, no ads. If we could only have one puzzle set on our phone, it would be this one.
Ad-free, thoughtfully designed, clearly handcrafted with love.
No ads, so many different puzzles. Plenty of customization. Well documented. Amazing game. Our only complaint is that marks on games like towers dont really work. But that shouldnt deter you. GET THIS GAME.
No ads which is just beautiful. Been playing these puzzles for years on the website, mostly Mines since all of them are solvable without guessing unlike Microsofts version. Found this app about two years ago via Reddit and we havent looked back. No bugs, simple design and engaging puzzles. Our only gripe is that there is no zoom feature. On iPad it is fine, but it is difficult to play high difficulty games on iPhone due to the tiny numbers. Still our favorite app ever.
And we mean it the minimalistic and yet intuitive and extremely smart design, the choice of particular puzzles each of which are completely unique and have a distinct gamestyle. This is really just amazing, and the fact we had to scroll this much down to find this gem is a huge shame.
We tap and even hold, but nothing happens, if anything what am we doing wrong.
Awesome. And we have only played Dominosa and Pattern so far. 5/5. Our only feedback so far is that being able to zoom a little on Pattern when the grid gets bigger would be really helpful.
We absolutely love these puzzles. Ive been playing with them for the past nearly 20 years when our dad had them on his Palm Pilot. Ive since started using the computer to play, but having them in our pocket whenever Im out and about is awesome. The interface is simple and effective, the puzzles are endlessly unique and entertaining. Sure, we have our preferences, but theres enough variety for everyone to find multiple favorites. The only complaint we have: theres one puzzle, Mosaic, thats available on the PC that isnt on the mobile apps. Why is that? Can we please have it on the app.
Thank you, Greg, for porting over this masterpiece.
Best app ever. Touch is always position accurate and the user interface is simple, elegant, and intuitive. App is fully responsive and always gives immediate feedback to the user with no loading screens. The puzzles are awesome, but we made this review primarily for the points above. We wish other applications could be nearly as responsive as this application. Thanks for the excellent programming work put into this.
So happy this got updated for recent devices. A perfect collection of logic puzzles no monetization, no levels, no flashy characters, just puzzles. A joy.
God we love this app. No ads, simple interface, fun puzzles. Its almost perfect, and we would absolutely recommend it to anyone in a heartbeat. The only thing about this app we dont love, is the lack of a zoom feature. Its difficult to play some of the larger puzzles because we simply cant see them. We believe the Samsung version has one, why dont we? Again, this is still an amazing app and one we absolutely love.
This is our favorite app and highly underrated. So many different puzzles, no ads, detailed instructions, and most of the puzzles are completely logical. chefs kiss.
Ive been playing these small puzzles for the longest time. However, there are a few functions that are on the android version that would be great to see on the iPhone – like the shift button so long presses arent needed every time.
We have been using this puzzle pack on multiple platforms for more than a decade. We love the versatility and range of different puzzles available for free and with no advertisements.
Have played hundreds of hours with no issues, but it [version 1.3] crashes on startup with iOS14. Sure hope a fix is forthcoming [it was]. Update: fixed! Thanks, Greg. It was only a few days, but we really missed this app. Glad to have it back.
Thank you for these games. We love playing them and learning new ways to work the problems. We just wish the interface was as good as the android version. There is no way to delete/clear a cell in some of the games(Keen), no way to favorite games, no zoom in inertia, etc. We really do love the games and thank you.
Thank you for these games. We love playing them and learning new ways to work the problems. We just wish the interface was as good as the android version. There is no way to delete/clear a cell in some of the games(Keen), no way to favorite games, no zoom in inertia,.
First off, we want to say how much we love this app. The games are wonderful and its free with no ads. We really appreciate this developer. Theres really only one thing we would change, and thats for the sake of usability on the iPhone. The game makes heavy use of the long press. Unfortunately, the long press doesnt work along the left edge of the iPhone screen. This makes certain games difficult to play, especially when you set the board to large. The iPhone also makes a loud and annoying click every time you long press, which can only be disabled by putting the phone in silent mode. Thats a complaint we have with the iPhone, not this app, but because of the heavy long press usage of this app, we have to choose between potentially giving ourselves a migraine with the constant clicking and turning on silent mode and potentially forgetting to turn it off and missing alarms and calls. Both of these issues would be easily fixable by putting in a UI toggle to switch between the two modes (right click and left click, long press and tap, or whatever you want to call them) and eliminating the need to use the long press.
Can we somehow get a zoom option? Our fat fingers make it hard to do some bigger puzzles. Other than that. Great app.
We love the puzzles. However we have one complaint and one suggestion. The complaint is that winning a puzzle doesnt feel very good. Just a lil pop up saying you win with the score and a new game button would be great. The suggestion is for the minesweeper part specifically. We need to be able to zoom in. Our fat sausage fingers cant hit the mines on the bigger boards, particularly on our little iPhone.
Ill make this a 5-star when we can input game codes. We can see specific game codes but we cant input and apply.
Some of these puzzles are a little difficult to play with a touch screen because of the lack of ability to zoom and reliance on long presses. For example, playing Loopy at higher levels means you can barely control where you tap and long pressing reliably is essentially impossible, so your solve is full of "errors" that aren't the player's fault.
We love having all these puzzles to play! However, after using this app on android, the iOS version feels almost unusable. The android app had easy and intuitive controls that are just not present on iOS. For example, with the Solo puzzle (which is a renamed sudoku), notes are simple and can be edited on android, but on iOS its hard to make notes in the first place, and once youve moved away from the box, you cant edit the notes youve made. Its also clear that these puzzles were ported from PC, and some of them dont have working controls at all; we feel like we need a keyboard and mouse to make anything work right. In fact, all of the help menus reference the keyboard and mouse instead of the touchscreen. We suppose we cant expect too much for being a completely free app with no ads, but it just feels leagues behind the android app. Still, the puzzles that do work well on iOS are fun, and we keep playing them :).
Developer is not interested in updating app, despite being LITERALLY HANDED an already up-to-date branch on GitHub. Other people have done all the hard work of integrating Simons latest changes into his code base, and this developer is unwilling to do the simple task of vetting changes, and pushing to Apple. Disappointing.
This collection of puzzles is free, well-done, and well-maintained, as shown by recent new version maintaining compatibility with iOS 14. Our only (minor) nit is that there doesnt seem to be a way to erase squares in the Pattern game.
This game lots of fun but now it no longer works since ios 14 PLEASE update and make it work again.
The best collection of logic puzzles on the App store by FAR. Ken Ken is our favorite (here called Keen). Infinitely new puzzles, auto-generated.
No advertisements, no payment, just a simple app with something like 38 different puzzle games, and you can set the difficulty on pretty much all of them. Its a no brainer that this is a way better deal than most mobile games that are just one simple game, riddled with advertisements, and sometimes you have to pay for.
Had a similar app on our android tablet that we loved and after a lot of searching Im relieved to find something similar for apple. Best puzzle collection app hands down. Simple with no nonsense. Edit to add::: the one difference is the android one had a night mode. Would be great if this did too since we mostly play to wind down for bed. Thanks.
An amazing collection of games for short elevator, subway, bus trips. Custom game parameters can be made for longer sessions. The developers are geniuses! Your smart phone or tablet was made to have this tablet installed on it.
This is the best logic puzzle application in existence. So many different puzzles, no advertisements, no frills, and detailed guides if you get stuck. Ive also never seen a minesweeper game where its generated in a way where you can always use logical deduction (no guessing!!). Thats amazing. We have yet to try out all the puzzles carefully, but we know that we will be spending many hours with this. Bless.
Better than most other greedy apps on the store.
The premier collection of open-source puzzles, provided free without cost or ads. Occupy yourself for 2 to 20 minutes on different brain exercises. A rare gem.
Best of all possible worlds. Some of the best single player puzzle games in one place. Search this app's title to find online versions of these same puzzles to play on your browser.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.3.2
- Size: 3.59 MB
- iOS: 9.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Greg Hewgill]()
Last updated: 21st September 2020 | Genre: Puzzle, Entertainment | Developer: Greg Hewgill