About Gamer Nation

The games are built here

Each board on this site is a program written for it: the sudoku generator, the killer sudoku
solver, the draughts engine, the word-search grid builder and the rest. None of them loads
anything from anywhere else. There is no embedded player, no file from another site, and nothing
to install — the puzzle you are given was made in your browser a moment before you saw it.

Why that matters here

Sites like this one used to work the other way round. They were catalogues of files other
people had made, played through a plugin that browsers removed at the end of 2020. When the
plugin went, the catalogues went with it, and a great many links that used to lead to a game now
lead to an empty rectangle. Building the games rather than collecting them is the only version of
this site that still works.

Mechanics, not titles

Sudoku, draughts, snakes and ladders, the sliding puzzle, the pairs game and the code-breaking
game are all old and unowned; the rules belong to nobody. The boxed versions of several of them
are somebody’s property, and those names appear nowhere on this site, in any form. Where a game
is best known by a trademarked name, it is called what it is instead — a code breaker, a
memory match — and the page says so plainly.

What the puzzles promise

A generated puzzle has exactly one solution, checked before it is handed over rather than
assumed. A board labelled hard is hard for a stated reason: the difficulty is the hardest
technique the puzzle actually forces, not a count of blank squares. A hint is a deduction the
board can justify, and when nothing can be deduced it says so rather than reading the answer.