Sudoku meets a match three game and spawns something really interesting: Oh Hi.

dislekcia

You know when you're thinking about puzzle game concepts and you despair that there aren't any more mechanics to find that are as elegant as sudoku? You were wrong:

http://0hh1.com

I'm pretty fluent at 8x8 grids right now, 10x10 is still a bit tricky.

creative630

That's amazing! I really want this on my phone.
So much simpler than Sudoku without loosing challenge :)

Elyaradine

Played a few games, and the only thing I felt wasn't very elegant was the rule where no two rows/columns may be the same. That one was quite tedious for me to spot, especially when the rows and columns are quite far apart and where there are many of them, and to check whether two rows/columns are similar felt very slow.

dislekcia

@Elyaradine: You only need to bother to look for rows/columns that are identical to ones that have 2 open slots. If they have more than that, there's no point checking yet.

I've started looking at possibility patterns in the game now, 10x10 is where that stuff begins being useful.

Tuism

Wow it's so hard. I love that it's a very elegant mathematical design, but damn, I can't wrap my head around it.

Guess it's also why my Threes high score is only 10,050 :/

francoisvn

Very sleek, and pretty interesting, but I don't feel it has that much depth. I managed to fairly easily solve 10x10 boards by just applying the rules iteratively. That said, the games are of a pretty good length, and the logic is very intuitive. I still want to play a bit more, but I have to work now, so there's definitely something there. I'm installing the mobile app now, so I'll study it a bit more later.

Github, with code and links to apps: https://github.com/Q42/0hh1

dislekcia

francoisvn said:

I managed to fairly easily solve 10x10 boards by just applying the rules iteratively.

Yup. That's pretty much all Sudoku (and Kakoru, and Picross, etc) are: applying known rules iteratively until you can figure out an end state. I love that sort of stuff :)

francoisvn

I make a distinction between the core/minimal game rules and derived rules. In difficult puzzles of Sudoku, Kakuro, Picross/Nonograms, Alcazar and such, you often have to use these derived rules, and sometimes even a little puzzle-specific logic. You could argue it's pretty much the same thing, but I find great enjoyment in figuring out the derived rules. Lyne is another example of a game in this sort of genre, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I think of it.

On 0hh1, I feel like any required derived rules are fairly evident from just hearing the rules (vs having to play and discover them), which makes it less interesting for me, but I only played it for a little bit, so I still need to give it more time before I make a proper decision.

dammit

So, after playing this for ages (and getting somewhat addicted because I like mental challenges like this) I would say that the one thing that frustrates me is the scoring system. You get 100 points for a 10x10 grid regardless of if you asked for hints or completed it with no mistakes... it just feels like they had the opportunity here to make you "strive for bettering your play" but didn't use it.

dislekcia

@dammit: Good point, that's totally a thing they could have dinged you for using the hints on or for backtracking. I didn't really consider the score while playing, blindspot ;)