Tile Games

The early PCs that came from IBM -- remember the Juniors? -- had a set of games to urge people to learn to use a mouse. Remember Free Cell and Minesweeper?

The other day reading Tony Hillerman, there's a reference to Free Cell as a puzzle, and it has finally dawned on me what he means: it's not a solitaire, all the tiles present are in view, and the object is only to sort them out in the kind of rules that solitaire uses.

There's a game put out by Yahoo that's similar, but the tiles in each round are marked with letters. Its name is Text Twist and it's fun in the same way that Free Cell is fun, in that the total object is to locate all the words in this small set of tiles.

These are not games of chance. But as puzzles, they're pretty good.