puzzles

7 Little Words is a simple, minimal puzzle game that's perfect for fans of crosswords, anagrams, word searches, and other word-based games. The first 30 puzzles are free. After that, you can purchase extra puzzles in packs of 50 for 99 cents from the Android Market.

The gameplay is simple. Guess the seven words. To help you, you get seven clues, the number of letters in each word, and a reservoir of letter combinations from which to construct your guesses. Since there is no time limit or penalty for guessing wrong, you pretty much just play until you win (… Read more

In Greedy Spiders, your job is to rescue helpless flies being hunted by one or sometimes several hungry arachnids. Each fly is thoroughly trapped in web, but with a simple tap of your finger you're able to cut individual strands to eventually free them all. The problem is, every time you make a move, the spiders get to make one, inching themselves progressively closer to their prey.

To start, you get to cut a single strand of web per turn. A good strategy is to either snip near the spider to cut off its route, or snip one of … Read more

Traffic Jam is an addictive puzzle game that tasks you with driving a small yellow car out of an overcrowded parking lot. It may not sound very complicated, but with increasingly difficult configurations of parked cars clogging the exit, you can be sure it'll have your head spinning in no time.

Each level starts off with several cars strewn about an invisible grid that allows movement only along straight lines. No turns can be made, and of course, cars cannot be lifted. This means that you have to carefully decide which cars to move, and in which sequence, in … Read more

What more can one say about Tetris? The megapopular classic '80s action puzzle game from Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov is now available for the iPhone, featuring everything you loved about the original, and some added bonuses to keep the game interesting. The game is crystal-clear with Retina Display support and the simple interface requires only swipes and taps on the screen to move, rotate, and drop pieces on the board. Sometimes the tap-to-rotate and swipe-to-move method can be a little frustrating (it's easy to make mistakes), but we were mostly able to enjoy the classic game on our iPhone … Read more

Sokoban has been around since the 1980s, challenging users to move boxes around a puzzle and into designated storage areas. It sounds easy in theory, but there's actually quite a bit of strategy involved. Sokoban++ is a basic version of the puzzle game that won't impress you with its graphics, but will definitely strain your brain with its 50 levels of challenging gameplay.

The program's interface is plain and not particularly intuitive; if you've never played Sokoban before, you'll definitely be turning to the HTML Help file in short order. Although some versions of Sokoban … Read more

Shape Shift is a free, ad-supported puzzler, a classic color-matching game played on a grid, but with a couple of twists that make this app stand out.

The setup should look familiar to fans of the genre: you play on a 9-by-7 grid of colored blocks, and the goal is to match up--and take out--adjacent groups of four or more of the same color. In addition to being red, yellow, orange, green, or blue, each block also has a triangle, square, or circle on it, and you can swap any two blocks that share the same shape. The scoring and … Read more

Memory Trainer stimulates your brain with a targeted program of scientifically developed exercises. According to the app's developers (who reference several studies in their descriptions), consistent training is proven to improve your memory over time and even help lower your risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Now, we can't say for sure that Memory Trainer did all that, but we can say that the app is fun, it gets progressively more challenging, and it's strangely addictive. You can engage with Memory Trainer either through a mapped-out 20 session program or through individual targeted exercises including TileFlip, Numberz, Sequencer, … Read more

Cut the Rope is an inventive, addictive, and extremely polished arcade puzzler, in which you interact with increasingly complex, physics-based puzzles to get a piece of candy into the mouth of a cute monster named Om Nom.

Cut the Rope's interface starts out simple: you just swipe your finger to cut a rope, which drops an attached piece of candy into Om Nom's mouth. Soon, you're cutting multiple ropes (occasionally more than one at a time), trying to maneuver the plummeting piece of candy to pass over stars on its way to Om Nom (between one and … Read more

If loving jigsaw puzzles makes us nerdy, we're OK with that. Any true puzzle lover has high standards, though, and we're afraid that if you're serious about puzzles, Jigsaw Puzzle Lite may not be for you--at least not if you're looking for a free puzzle program.

The program's interface is plain, with a pane across the top that displays the different categories of puzzles; there are animals, architecture, food, nature, and so on. Click a category and the various puzzle offerings are displayed in the pane below. There are 25 puzzles in each category, but … Read more