About Tidy Puzzles

Tidy Puzzles is a small, independent site that does one thing: classic puzzles and card games, cleanly made, free to play in the browser. This page says who is behind it, why it exists, what we decided not to do, and who we owe credit to.

Who makes this

Tidy Puzzles is run by a small independent team. The owner and first developer is Tam, who wanted a Sudoku he could open on his phone without an app store, a login or a full-screen ad, and could not find one that also felt trustworthy. Everything on the site, the generators, the solvers, the card art and the copy, is made by us.

There is no company behind it beyond the people who make it, and no investors. The site is paid for by ads placed around the board, which is what keeps it free.

Why we built it

The classic puzzles belong to everyone: Sudoku, Minesweeper, Klondike, nonograms and the rest are generic games with no owner. Yet most places to play them online are heavy, slow and built to interrupt. We think a puzzle site can be quiet: load fast, be honest about what a puzzle is and is not, keep your data on your device, and get out of the way.

Design principles

• The board comes first. It renders at its final size before anything else, and nothing pushes it around later.
• Fair by construction. A Sudoku has one solution; a nonogram is solvable by logic alone; a shuffle can be undone; a deal is called winnable only when a solver has checked it.
• Nothing to sign up for. Stats, settings and unfinished games live in your browser.
• Explain rather than hint vaguely. A Sudoku hint names the technique so you learn it.
• Works everywhere: phones from 360 px wide, desktops, keyboards, screen readers, high contrast, reduced motion, offline.
• No hype. Plain language, no exclamation marks, no pop-ups asking for anything.

Licences and credits

The mechanics of 2048 are not copyrightable, and the original browser implementation by Gabriele Cirulli (2014) is released under the MIT licence. Our version is written from scratch and shares no code with it, but the idea is his and we are glad to say so.

The site is built with Astro and Preact, both MIT-licensed. Seeded random numbers, the basis of every daily puzzle and puzzle code, come from the seedrandom library (MIT). Printable PDFs are generated with pdf-lib (MIT). Offline play uses a service worker built with Workbox (MIT). We add no GPL or AGPL dependencies and no server-side code.

All card faces, game icons, memory-match symbols and other artwork are drawn in-house as SVG. No third-party deck art, icon sets or emoji fonts are used. The Word Search lists are written for this site.

Trademarks

Game names on this site are generic terms for classic games. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Tidy Puzzles is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, and our designs are our own rather than imitations of any product.

How to reach us

Write to hello@tidypuzzles.com. Bug reports with the game, the device, the browser and the puzzle code are the most useful thing you can send. The contact page has the details, and the How it works page answers most questions about fairness and privacy.

Last updated 2026-09-27.