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Dorfromantik
A hand-painted tile-placement puzzler: draw one hexagonal tile at a time and rotate it so its forests, fields, houses, rivers and rails line up with their neighbours. Complete quests to win tiles back and keep the village landscape growing, in Berlin studio Toukana Interactive's debut.
puzzlelogicminimalistThe Signal State
A 2D logic puzzler where you slot modules — AND, NOT, attenuators, sample-and-hold — into a rack and patch them with cables carrying voltages from -100 to 100 until the output waveform matches the spec. Reckoner Industries builds it on modular synthesis, framed as repairing the irrigation of a ruined farm.
puzzleprogramminglogicKaizen: A Factory Story
A 2D automation puzzle set in 1986 Japan: lay arms and tracks across a green workbench, program a timeline of commands, and build assembly lines for calculators, camcorders and arcade cabinets. Made by the original Zachtronics team under their new studio Coincidence, with a pachinko-flavoured solitaire on the side.
puzzleautomationprogrammingSilicon Zeroes
An open-ended puzzle set in a 1960s Silicon Valley startup, where you wire simple parts — adders, multiplexers, latches — into a working CPU with instruction decoding and pipelining. From PleasingFungus Games, maker of Manufactoria, a CPU-design game that hides the bits and shows only how the parts behave.
puzzleprogramminglogicMOLEK-SYNTEZ
In a cramped 2092 Romanian apartment, you program a home-built synthesizer to turn benzene and acetone into small pharmacological molecules — a Zachtronics optimization puzzle you operate only from the edges of a finite board.
puzzlesimulationTIS-100
An assembly-language programming puzzle: you write code across a grid of tiny parallel nodes to repair a broken computer. Each node holds two registers and barely a dozen instructions, and passing data between nodes can deadlock — inside those constraints you compete on cycles, instructions and node count. From Zachtronics, makers of SpaceChem and Opus Magnum.
puzzleprogramminglogicHuman Resource Machine
A puzzle game where you feed a dozen commands to a tiny office worker between an inbox and an outbox, building 'programs' from sorts to multiplication to prime factorization. From World of Goo's Tomorrow Corporation, it hands you assembly-style thinking via drag-and-drop.
puzzleprogramminglogicInfinifactory
A first-person 3D puzzle where you build factories from blocks and conveyors to assemble whatever your alien captors order. SpaceChem made three-dimensional: a tiny verb set opening onto bottomless optimisation, from Zachtronics.
puzzleautomationprogrammingSHENZHEN I/O
A programming puzzle in which you play an engineer at a fictional Shenzhen firm, writing terse assembly for cramped virtual microcontrollers and wiring circuits onto a board to build client products. Zachtronics ships no tutorial — its 30-plus-page datasheet manual is the first puzzle.
puzzleprogrammingoptimizationOpus Magnum
A 2D puzzle where, in an alchemist's workshop, you combine rotating and extending arms with tracks to ferry and bond atoms into potions and metals. The board and part count are unlimited, so the contest is less about clearing than about how elegantly, quickly, and compactly you build — Zachtronics' signature work.
puzzleprogrammingautomationSpaceChem
A 2D puzzle where you program two 'waldos' to grab, carry, and bond atoms, building factories that turn raw molecules into products. You don't find a solution — you build one. The design-based puzzle that launched Zachtronics.
puzzleprogrammingautomation
